Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about two one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian.
There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn’t seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.
How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I’d been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They’d all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way. . . and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.
Most of the women were achingly handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I’d been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.
I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander’s eccentricity. It is absolately forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, if the relationship interferes with a unit’s combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF’s regulations could be broken so casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.
But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they’d look after another year, I wasn’t sure.
“Tench-hut!” That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn’t jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.
“My name is Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.” That used to be “Field First Sergeant.” A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.
Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I’d seen her profile and knew that she’d only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.
Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.
She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don’t waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.
It made me wish I’d had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster-we were scheduled to board ship the next day-and I’d only had a few words with my officers.
Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential “good guy-bad guy” situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.
We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we’d arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in “modern” armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We’d used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I’d been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.