The Living Will Envy The Dead (2 page)

And, because I’d been more influenced by Uncle Billy than I liked to admit, I joined the Marines.

I’d like to tell you that I aced my way through the training course and the dreaded Crucible.  It would be an utter lie.  Nothing in my life, not even Uncle Billy’s patented March of Death, came close to Marine training.  The Drill Sergeant worked us all to death and flogged us onwards, further than we had believed possible, breaking us down and reshaping us into Marines.  It was a good thing that I wasn't particularly vain, or I would probably have cried at the haircut; I looked ghastly.  They pounded us and pounded us until we were at the verge of quitting, pushed us through hell…and then finally served us steak and eggs before declaring us United States Marines.  I have never been prouder of myself than at that moment.

One thing led to another and I soon found myself assigned to the 1
st
Marine Division, which was on its way to Iraq.  I was assigned to Regimental Combat Team (RCT) Seven, 1
st
Battalion, 7
th
Marines, commanded by a Lieutenant-Colonel.  The Lieutenant-Colonel and his subordinates managed to conceal their
huge
delight at seeing me in the midst of all the preparations for war.  We were going into Iraq, all the way to Baghdad, and God help the bastards who got in our way.  We trained, and exercised, and went though hours upon hours of live-fire targeting practice, just to ensure that we were ready.  The difference between a soldier, of which Iraq had very few, and a thug, of which Iraq had a great number, lies in training and discipline.  Iraqi training tended towards the “point
this
end towards the enemy, don’t look back and don’t run, or you will be shot” style.  As you can imagine, thousands of Iraqis surrendered rather easily when the shooting finally started, although the war wasn't the cakewalk it was supposed to have been.  Long story there, covered elsewhere.

I don’t want to admit it, but I was scared.  The closest I had come to combat action before was fighting Moe, and doing some hunting with Uncle Billy, and neither of them were anything like
real
fighting.  Moe had been a coward – most bullies are cowards; hit them hard enough and they will fold – and dissuading him from picking on me had been easy, once I had prepared.  The hunting trips had been fun, but the animals didn’t shoot back…and, indeed, I had never been under fire before.  How would I cope, I wondered, when the shit
really
hit the fan?

We moved out and advanced into Iraq.  We took the oil refineries before the Iraqis could blow them, although several sensible Iraqis had decided that blowing them would…not be in the country’s best interests.  I was relieved, despite myself, but Ambush Alley soon cured me of pre-combat jitters.  You know those pictures of Marines advancing into An Nasiriyah?  One of them was me. 

If nothing else – slight digression here – Ambush Alley showed the importance of training and exercises.  The famed – it should be infamous - 507
th
Maintenance Company, which included the famed Jessica Lynch, failed its combat test rather spectacularly, although their Iraqi opponents didn’t do much better either.  They hadn’t been trained properly and hadn’t been under fire before.  Worse, an A-10 made a serious mistake in the heat of battle and strafed a company of Marines north of the Saddam Canal.  They hadn’t been trained enough either, although one of the oldest jokes in the book covers precision weapons and friendly fire – they’re not.

I won’t go through the campaign in blow-by-blow detail.  We pushed north, getting more and more hacked off at the Iraqis as we moved, and eventually reached Baghdad.  There were plenty of Iraqis who decided to fight, either through stubbornness, or through having a secret policeman holding a gun at their backs, forcing them onwards to death.  We found that if we located and shot the secret policeman, the Iraqis attacking us tended to surrender or to try to run.  Others, however, fought almost professionally.  They had balls, all right.   The worst of all were the foreign fighters who came into Iraq in hopes of killing an American.  We killed them by the thousand and the locals refused to bury them, a gesture of contempt for fellow Muslims.  We had to bury them ourselves.

I spent the next two years, by and large, on counterinsurgency duty.  I didn’t know at the time – no one did – that the early years of the Occupation would be so badly mismanaged.  Remember what I said about some Iraqis having balls?  The men we needed, the ones who could have helped rebuild their country, were tossed out onto the streets when we disbanded the army.  There are so few things in life I want, but one thing I do want is ten minutes alone with the moron who convinced the President that it would be a good idea.  It wasn’t.  Oh, I do understand the political factors involved, but the bottom line was that it was a fucking stupid trade-off and one that cost American lives.  I fought in more tiny little encounters than I like to admit, and several really big fights like Fallujah…and then I was wounded.  I hadn’t escaped unscathed during the previous years, but this time…the IED exploded under my vehicle and when I awoke, I was being evacuated back to the States.  It was pretty bad.

On the other hand, that’s where I met Mac.  They operated on me as soon as they could, before shipping me into a hospital to recover, basically just pointing me to a bed.  I didn’t mind.  I’d several years worth of sleep to catch up on, even if I did feel like I’d gone ten rounds with the Corps fighting champion.  I climbed into the bed, lay down, and sometime later was awoken by a voice.

“Jesus Christ,” it said.  “They’ve brought us the Doctor!”

I opened one eye and glared at the speaker.  All right, I did look a bit like David Tennant – who had been the Doctor for two years when I was wounded – but there was no call for something like that.

“And who are you meant to be?”  I demanded.  Mac - Robert McNab, to give him his full name – was a short ugly sparkplug.  I’d call him worse, were it not for the fact that he is proofreading this book.  “Mike O’Neal?”

He laughed and a beautiful friendship was formed.  Mac was an Army Ranger who’d just been returned ahead of time from Afghanistan.  Like me, he loved science-fiction and military history, while he introduced me to other kinds of fiction, including fantasy and alternate history.  We spent many happy hours chatting away while they tried to nurse us back to health and, once we were allowed out of the hospital, we painted the town red together.  I’d love to tell you some of the stories, but as I said, Mac’s proofreading this.  I’ll leave everything we did to your imagination.

As it happened, both of us were too badly wounded to return to combat at once, although Mac would and did recover fully.  I don’t mean that we were walking around with a broken leg or some other such nonsense, but we were no longer at the peak of physical fitness.  That wasn’t actually a problem and so we found ourselves being dragged into advisory roles.  We had actually been in combat and had seen the elephant…and we were perfect to tell some civilians just what was wrong with their war-winning gadget.  They didn’t have a fucking clue!

No, I don’t mean that they were bad people; I mean that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what real combat entailed.  There was a firm, headed by this really hot babe – and boy, do I mean
hot
– which had come up with the perfect camouflage suit.  It might not have been the Predator’s perfect cloaking device, but a soldier could wear it and he would be invisible.  He would also be dead.  It worked fine in the lab, but in the field the temperature just kept rising.  Back to the drawing board, we said, and we made it stick.  I don’t know how we got away with it.

One thing led to another, again, and we found ourselves working on all kinds of committees.  The military has to be a planner.  Every so often, the media will ‘discover’ that the military has a plan to invade…well, insert your favourite enemy country here.  They missed the point, of course.  The Pentagon is supposed to have a plan for anything that they might be called upon to do.  There was no sign of hostile intent in coming up with the plans.  As you might imagine, they missed that point as well.  We worked on nuclear war plans – more on that later – disaster recovery plans and pretty much every kind of contingency that you could imagine.  Would you believe, really, that they even had a plan for alien invasion?  They did.

Some of the scenarios were truly depressing.  There were some for expected civil wars in 2000, and again in 2008.  I hadn’t believed that either would have been likely, although there were moments before both elections when violence loomed its ugly head.  I even studied a book covering a civil war against an evil President and found myself wondering, grimly, where I would stand if it really came down to blows.  We had all kinds of interesting debates on the subject.  I might even have convinced a few civilians that I wasn't an asshole…and nor were the rest of the Corps.

But I didn’t know what to do with myself.  Don’t misunderstand.  I was enjoying some of what Mac and I were doing, but it wasn't what I’d signed up to do.  What good is a Marine with a punctured lung?  The RCT had moved on without me, most of my friends had been promoted or had left the Corps – or had been killed, in a handful of cases – and I had been left behind.  I spent a year as an MP in Afghanistan, but that wasn't really me, somehow.  It was Mac who suggested the solution, in the end, and who pulled strings on my behalf.  The town of Ingalls needed a sheriff and I, a Marine, was an ideal choice.  The people in smaller towns tend to be more patriotic – it may be because they know more soldiers, proportionally speaking – and besides, Mac’s family had lived there for generations.  I wasn't sure, at first, but hell, it sounded like a change.  I moved out, settled in, learned the ropes, met the people and ended up enjoying myself…

And then came the war.

A nuclear war could ruin your whole day.

-Anon

I wasn’t there at the time.

That should be obvious.  I wasn't the President of America, or the President of Russia, or one of the other world leaders during the years before the war.  I wasn't making decisions on a strategic level.  I might have been working on operational plans, but I never actually had to put one of them into use…and I certainly never ordered that any of them were to be used.  I can only tell you what I saw at the time, from the outside, and what was pieced together later, sometimes much later.  The general level of devastation caused by the Final War saw to that.

This is the story as I understand it.  There are already people who disagree with my basic outline, but you can look them up on your own.  This is the story of the year the world decided to have a damn good try at committing suicide.  Even now, years after the fact, I still get angry every time I think about it.  Those fucking idiots in the White House, and the Kremlin, and Ten Downing Street, and every other governmental building in what we liked to call the First World, made pretty much every dumb mistake in the book.  When nuclear weapons are involved…oh, I could stand them all up against the wall and pull the trigger, were it not that that would be too kind.

Anyway…

Let me start by pointing out something that should be obvious, so naturally no politician grasped the point.  An American soldier at Point A is not at Point B.  That should be fairly understandable.  A man cannot be in two places at once.  What does that mean, you might ask, for the war?  Simple; a Brigade Combat Team – or whatever – that was in Iraq was not in America, or Poland, or Germany, or Japan, or Korea, or wherever else we might want to have a BCT.  We actually saw this problem on a smaller scale in Iraq.  The country was about the size of Texas and, at first, we just didn’t have the manpower to cover everywhere we
needed
to cover.  It didn’t help that we didn’t realise how many places we
had
to cover, but I digress.  The bottom line was that every American soldier who went to Iraq was an American soldier who could not be used elsewhere.

Now, the United States, before the Final War, was the most powerful nation in the world.  We had the most powerful geopolitical position in history.  We had a navy that out-massed every other navy put together.  We had an air force that could shoot all of our possible competitors out of the sky without breaking a sweat.  We might not have had the largest army in the world – I think that that was the Chinese, although some of the other communist states had much larger percentages of their population in uniform, or in the reserves – but we had the most powerful army in the world.  It took us twenty-one days to destroy Saddam’s regime.  That is almost unprecedented in the history of modern warfare.

What we
weren't
was all-powerful.  Remember what I said about that American soldier?  Use him in one place, can’t use him elsewhere?  That held as true for us as it does for anyone else.  We might have been powerful, but our concentration on Iraq meant that other powers could start to get on with their own plans, because they
knew
that we could do nothing to stop them, but political hot air.  NATO was little more than a talking house and had been ever since the end of the Cold War.  We had obligations that we couldn’t meet, obligations that we didn’t have the forces to meet, or the position.  We were riding for a fall.