Recruit, Jonathan Brazee [which ebook reader .txt] 📗

Chapter 12

Ryck liked RCET, but he absolutely loved Camp Lympstone, where the field training was conducted.  During Phases 1 and 2, the platoon DIs were God and Satan combined with full and constant control over the recruits.  At Lympstone, the DIs were still ever-present, but the TDIs[14] took over more of the recruits’ time.  The TDIs were not pushovers, though.  They would still explode with the best of the DIs, and they would still assign “motivational training,” but the focus was more on teaching recruits the skills they needed to function as combat Marines.

Camp Charles was no Hilton resort, but it was plush when compared to Lympstone.  Recruits slept in small two-man tents called “bivvies,” bathed in field showers, and ate combat rations twice a day.  It was rough, uncomfortable, and Spartan—and Ryck couldn’t get enough. 

As with the Legion, a Marine’s origin was meaningless.  What mattered was being a Marine.  However, tradition had it that the senior TDI at Lympstone came from the UK back on Earth or from Mollytot, Liverpool, or Barclays, the three UK-settled worlds.  Master Sergeant Cletton Smith was no exception to this tradition.  He was a short, very dark-skinned SNCO,[15] whose eyes seemed to miss nothing.  The officer in charge was Major Simms, who unlike most of the officers at Camp Charles, did not observe from afar but actively got involved with the recruits.  Training Drill Instructor Smith scared Ryck, as he scared most recruits, but Ryck knew his place with him.  It was disconcerting, though, when running during PT to have Major Simms show up, jogging beside a recruit, casually asking how things were going.

Part of the Lympstone experience was the use of an entirely new vocabulary.  Chow was no longer chow, for example, but “scran,” and the one hot scran each day was served in a “galley,” not a mess hall.  The first few days at Charles had been bad enough, learning to use, for example, “head” instead of toilet, “deck” instead of floor, and “hatch” instead of door.  At Lympstone, they took it even further, and messing up was sure to result in push-ups—or “press-ups,” that is.  The TDI who took it most to heart was not even from a British background.  The bull-necked Training Drill Instructor Jorge Jarumba was from Rio Tinto.  The Tintoites still spoke Spanish as their primary language, yet the TDI was the most fervent keeper of the tradition.

“You ready?” Recruit Fire Team Leader Lysander asked Wagons. 

Ryck had been promoted back to fire team leader two more times—which meant he’d been fired from the position, too.  The platoon as a whole was down to 52 recruits.  Ben Sutcliff had broken a leg on the obstacle course and been recycled, but the rest had been either drops or DORs.  The recruits were now organized into three squads of either three or four fire teams each.  Somehow, beyond all of Ryck’s expectations, his fire team, with Wagons, Hodges, and Calderón was intact.  Hodges was even showing signs of developing into an asset.

“I was born ready,” Wagons replied.  “Let’s kick some ass, OK?”

‘That’s fine, except we’re only facing hulks and targets out there.  No incoming,” Ryck said.

“Plenty of incoming, there, recruit,” Wagons told him.

“You know what I mean.  No rounds from an aggressor.  The ‘incoming’ is our supporting arms,” Ryck said.

Today’s training evolution was to be the first of many combined arms exercises.  The recruits had practiced every movement up to a company level.  They had done it under simulated fire, with enemy “hits” recorded, assessing simulated casualties.  They had moved against each other in mini-war games.  What they had not yet done was move in conjunction with Navy and Marine Corps space, air, artillery, and armor assets.  The day before, they had sat in the stands at Range 109 while the artillery had lit up the range.  It had been an amazing sight, and the concussions could be felt shaking their very bones.  It had been both impressive and frightening.  For the day’s evolution they would have to maneuver in conjunction with not only that level of destruction, but also the presence of a tank.

“Five mikes!” Shaymall shouted out.  “Squad leaders, get at them.”

Ryck glanced up as the squad’s current leader, Harris Thompson, made a quick check of First Fire Team.  With the new skins issued on the last day of Phase 2, there wasn’t as much to check.  There was the omnipresent weapons safety check and a quick check of the required battle gear, but their personal Marine armor had proven to be pretty much as advertised.  The body armor consisted of two levels.  The first was the “skins.”  The trousers and blouse looked and felt like normal civvies aside from the cammo patterns.  The fabric, though, was interwoven with nano-fibers which offered some ballistic and fire protection, monitored physical readings, and chameleoned to the surroundings.  The chameleon function was disabled during boot and was set on a dull yellow for all recruits and then changing to other colors for different training functions, but this was the actual working uniform each recruit would take with him into the fleet. 

The second level was the added armor.  Each Marine had a custom-fitted set of armor inserts, the “bones.”  The inserts weren’t actually inserted into the skins, though.  The bones, which weighed only 5 kg in total, came in 22 pieces, not counting the gloves.  Each piece was pushed up against the appropriate body part, and it immediately lampreyed onto the fabric, drawing both power and the appropriate camouflage pattern