It's amazing how quickly one goes from being fresh meat to being an old hand. On our first arrival to the Modesto, Alan and I received our billets, were greeted cordially if perfunctorily by Lieutenant Keyes (who raised an eyebrow when we passed along Sergeant Ruiz's compliments), and were treated with benign neglect by the rest of the platoon. Our squad leaders addressed us when we needed to be addressed, and our squadmates passed on information we needed to know. Otherwise, we were out of the loop.
It wasn't personal. The three other new guys, Watson, Gaiman and McKean, all got the same treatment, which centered on two facts. The first was that when new guys come in, it was because some old guy has gone—and typically "gone" meant "dead." Institutionally, soldiers can be replaced like cogs. On the platoon and squad level, however, you're replacing a friend, a squadmate, someone who had fought and won and died. The idea that you, whoever you are, could be a replacement or a substitute for that dead friend and teammate is mildly offensive to those who knew him or her.
Secondly, of course, you simply haven't fought yet. And until you do, you're not one of them. You can't be. It's not your fault, and in any event, it will be quickly corrected. But until you're in the field, you're just some guy taking up space where a better man or woman used to be.
I noticed the difference immediately after our battle with the Consu. I was greeted by name, invited to share mess-hall tables, asked to play pool or dragged into conversations. Viveros, my squad leader, started asking my opinion about things instead of telling me how things would be. Lieutenant Keyes told me a story about Sergeant Ruiz, involving a hovercraft and a Colonial's daughter, that I simply did not believe. In short, I'd become one of them—one of us. The Consu firing solution and the subsequent commendation helped, but Alan, Gaiman and McKean were also welcomed into the fold, and they didn't do anything but fight and not get killed. It was enough.
Now, three months in, we'd had a few more rounds of fresh meat come through the platoon, and seen them replace people we'd befriended—we knew how the platoon felt when we came to take someone else's place. We had the same reaction: Until you fight, you're just taking up space. Most fresh meat clued in, understood, and toughed out the first few days until we saw some action.
Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender, however, was having none of this. From the moment he showed up, he had been ingratiating himself to the platoon, visiting each member personally and attempting to establish a deep, personal relationship. It was annoying. "It's like he's campaigning for something," Alan complained, and this was not far off. A lifetime of running for office will do that to you. You just don't know when to shut it off.
Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender also had a lifetime of assuming people were passionately interested in what it was he had to say, which is why he wouldn't ever shut up, even when no one appeared to be listening. So when he was opining wildly on the CDF's problems in mess hall, he was essentially talking to himself. Be that as it may, his statement was provocative enough to get a rise out of Viveros, with whom I was lunching.
"Excuse me?" she said. "Would you mind repeating that last bit?"
"I said, I think the problem with the CDF is not that it's not a good fighting force, but that it's too easy to use," Bender repeated.
"Really," Viveros said. "This I have to hear."
"It's simple, really," Bender said, and shifted into a position that I immediately recognized from pictures of him back on Earth—hands out and slightly curved inward, as if to grasp the concept he was illuminating, in order to give it to others. Now that I was on the receiving end of the movement, I realized how condescending it was. "There's no doubt the Colonial Defense Forces are an extremely capable fighting force. But in a very real sense, that's not the issue. The issue is—what are we doing to avoid its use? Are there times when the CDF has been deployed where intensive diplomatic efforts might not have yielded better results?"
"You must have missed the speech I got," I said. "You know, the one about it not being a perfect universe and competition for real estate in the universe being fast and furious."
"Oh, I heard it," Bender said. "I just don't know that I believe it. There are how many stars in this galaxy? A hundred billion or so? Most of which have a system of planets of some sort. The real estate is functionally infinite. No, I think the real issue here may be that the reason we use force when we deal with other intelligent alien species is that force is the easiest thing to use. It's fast, it's straightforward, and compared to the complexities of diplomacy, it's simple. You either hold a piece of land or you don't. As opposed to diplomacy, which is intellectually a much more difficult enterprise."
Viveros glanced over to me, and then back to Bender. "You think what we're doing is simple?"