She was crouching and trying to relax. The sun was a motherfucker, but it was okay in the shade. She’d played catcher on her high school softball team, and she could stay in a crouch for a long time without getting uncomfortable, but the three men in her unit were sitting down on the concrete slab. Private First Class Elroy Trotter had his eyes closed, and for all Kim knew, Elroy might actually be sleeping. He never seemed to get excited one way or the other. The joke was that even while having sex Elroy probably looked bored. The person who first made that joke, Private Duran Edwards, was a black kid from Brooklyn who was a lot smarter than any of the other officers seemed to recognize, and Kim was glad Duran was in her unit. At first she’d had a bit of a thing for the third man, Private Hamitt “Mitts” Frank, but having him in her unit was like pouring water on a fire. Only smoke remained. She could see how the two of them might have ended up a couple in civilian life, but as part of a unit, it was different. They were a team. She was lucky. The whole crew was cool; none of them seemed to think it was a big deal that a woman was the fire team leader. She knew that early on, when the armed forces first started slotting women into combat units, there’d been some blowback. There’d been a couple of high-profile incidents in the army, but even in the Marines it hadn’t been all sweetness. Kim had still been in middle school when women were given equal status, though it was recent enough that some of the older generation still clearly hadn’t adjusted to Marines with tits in the line of fire. Elroy, Duran, and Mitts were her age, though, and they’d gone through boot camp with her. Maybe they secretly didn’t love the idea of taking combat orders from a woman in general, but since it was her, they were okay with it. They were familiar with Kim, and that made all the difference. Familiar with the fact that she was physically fit, able to compete with most of the men, familiar with the fact that she was smart and good at making quick decisions. They’d probably have accepted a different woman as their lance corporal, but it really did matter that they knew her. They trusted her to keep them safe.
Kim heard her name being called over the loudspeakers. “Okay,” she said to the unit. “We’re up in one. Remember, rifles on burst. Live fire, so extra careful here. Take your time and make good decisions. Quick action isn’t good unless it’s the right action.” The three men scrambled to their feet while Kim rose from her crouch and they all put their hands in, making a small pile of different shades of skin. “Be smart,” Kim said, “be strong, be Marines.”
She loved the sound of the four of them shouting “Oorah!” and the way their hands shot down and up. Loved the feel of the M16 in her hands, the click as she flipped the rifle from safety to burst fire. She loved the way she looked in her utility uniform, surrounded by other Marines, and as she felt the first hit of adrenaline spiking through her chest, loved the way it felt to be a Marine. Her parents had never understood her fascination with it, still didn’t understand why she was in uniform while all her friends from high school were off at college, drinking beer in dormitories and getting date-raped at frat parties. Well, Kim was pretty sure that’s not the way her parents thought her college experience would have gone, but for Kim, college was something she would do only as part of the Marines. She’d wanted to be a Marine since they first started letting women into combat units, and from the minute she first put on a uniform and laced up a pair of boots she understood the saying, “Once a Marine, Always a Marine.”
They got the green light and funneled down the chute. Duran and Elroy split left, taking cover behind a concrete barrier, while she and Mitts went right, taking cover behind the corner of a building. This was supposed to be an urban environment, and she had to hand it to whoever had built the set. It felt like being in a city. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center might be in the middle of nowhere—the going nickname for Twentynine Palms, the city adjacent to the MCAGCC, was Twentynine Stumps, for its wonderful lack of fun stuff to do—but the training was great. The talk among the other Marines was that there was a reason the training had been intensified: they’d be boots on the ground in Somalia sometime in the next couple of months. Kim believed the rumors. If the increased schedules of training had been just for her and the other green recruits, she might have dismissed the talk, but it wasn’t just the new Marines. Everybody had been gearing up.
She signaled for Duran and Elroy to cover, and she and Mitts hauled ass to the next barrier. Two civilian silhouettes popped up, and though she started to squeeze, she laid off the trigger. Then, as she saw Duran and Elroy leapfrogging past them, a target showed in the window of a building up ahead. Mitts didn’t see it—he was scanning low—but Kim swiveled and fingered the trigger. Set to “burst,” her rifle sent out three bullets with a single pull of the trigger, and she saw the target splinter and fall. Ahead of them, Duran and Elroy were already crouching and raising their weapons, but as she and Mitts started to rise to run forward, there was a voice over the loudspeaker.
“Cease fire. All Marines, cease fire. Lower weapons. Exercise terminated. Cease fire.”
Kim hesitated. Was this part of the exercise? She knew they occasionally liked to throw wrinkles in to simulate the unpredictability of real life in the field, but this seemed a little too self-referential for the Marines. Besides, the guys in her unit were already standing up and flicking their M16s to safe.
She rose, put her rifle on safe, and then looked at Mitts. “What the fuck?”
Mitts shrugged. “Who knows? I thought it was going well. We were moving nice. Good job with the shooting. Things were clean. Maybe somebody was still in the arena, one of the techs not all the way out before we started the exercise?”
Elroy and Duran wandered over, and though Duran had a dour look on his face, Elroy was his usual unflappable self. “Suppose we’ll have to start over,” Elroy said.
Kim sighed, because Mitts was right, they’d been doing a good job, and it was going to be hard to get themselves psyched up for another go. She started to tell the unit to head back to the chute when the loudspeaker crackled on again. This time it let out a long, piercing siren. This wasn’t just for the arena. This was for the whole base. And then, when the voice announced that all units were ordered to report immediately, when it said “This is not a drill,” she got concerned. Not because of what “This is not a drill” might mean or not mean, but because, for the first time she could remember, Private First Class Elroy Trotter looked worried.
Hindu Kush, Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border