Glucose and electricity.
They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.
I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.
I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.
Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.
Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party commander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on.
That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.
If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.
One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.
I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.
TABLE OF ORGANIZATION
Strike Force Gamma
Sade-138 Campaign
IECHN:
MAJ Mondella
COMM Anwpol
2ECHN:
CAPT Moore
3ECHN:
ILT Hilleboe
4ECHN:
2LT Riland
2LT Rusk
2LT ALvever MD
5ECHN:
2LT Borgstedz 2LT Brill
2LT Gainor
2LT Heimoff
6ECHN:
SSgr Webster SSgt Gillies
SSgr Abram:
SSgt Dole
7ECHN:
Sgt Dolins Sgz Bell Cpl Geller Cpl Kahn
Sgt Anderson
Cpl Kalvm
Sgt Noyes Cpl Spraggs
8ECHN:
Pvt Boas CpJ Weiner
Pvt Lingeman Pvt IkIe
Pvt Rosevear Pvt Schon
Pvt Wolfe, R. Pvt Shubik
Pvt Lin Pvt Duhl
Pvt Simmons Pvt Perloff
Pvt Winograd Pvt Moynihan
Pvt Brown Pvt Frank
Pvt Bloomquist Pvt Graubard
Pvt Wong Pvt Orlans
Pvt Louria Pvt Mayr
Pvt Gross Pvt Quarton
Pvt Asadi Pvt Hin
Pvt Horman Pvt Stendahi
Pvt Fox Pvt Erikson Pvt Born
Pvt Miller
Pvt Reisman
Pvt Coupling
Pvt Rosiow
Pvt Huntington
Pvt Dc Sola
Pvt Pool
Pvt Nepala
Pvt Schuba
Pvt Ulanov
Pvt Shelley
Pvt Lynn
Pvt Slaer