The Amazon Legion (Chapter 6) by Tom Kratman

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Prelude & Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6


Chapter Six


May all our citizens be soldiers, and all our soldiers citizens.

--Sarah Livingston Jay


Maria:

They couldn’t give it to us; it had to come from inside; inside ourselves.

I can’t speak for everybody; not for all the Amazonas. I can only tell you what I felt; what happened to me.

You remember how Centurion Garcia had made a bunch of us “pregnant,” making the rest of us carry their gear. Well that was imposed; we hated him every step of the way. And most of us, by this stage in our training would almost rather drop down dead than “get knocked up.” Certainly we wouldn’t ask to see the medics over little discomforts, as we might have if some other women hadn’t had to carry our load for us if we did.

I wonder, though, if we’d have been so reluctant if there had been some young men around to carry our gear for us. It’s just possible they wouldn’t even have minded, stupid boys. I sometimes think that men are overgrown babies whose spoiling of us often keeps us from quite growing up ourselves.

Or maybe we keep each other from ever quite growing up.

One impossibly late night after another impossibly long day I went to bed (not a real bed, of course, just my tacky air mattress under a strung out poncho). I was feeling a little poorly, nothing definite, just a general feeling of inner rottenness. But by morning I really was sick: dizzy, throwing up, a fever, too. I still don't know what it was that got me, influenza, bug bite, or reaming rod of randomness.

Unfortunately, we had another road march – heavy packs – scheduled for that morning. To add injury to insult, I had to carry the machine gun. I couldn’t; I just couldn’t.

The cadre had been dropping girls right and left of late. Less than half of those who had started were still with us. The rest were, like me, pretty much at their limit.

Curiously, again like me, it had also become extremely important to all but a tiny number of those remaining to complete training. Whatever it was: unwillingness to go home as failures, a real need for the benefits that went with service, some stirrings of pride in being soldiers, I don’t know.

In my case I had to finish training...for Alma’s sake.

I think Marta noticed me first, throwing up outside the perimeter. She came up and asked me, gently, what was wrong. I threw up again and started to cry for Alma; and for the life I’d hoped to build for us. I knew I’d never make the march. I’d be a failure. And they’d boot me out.

She held me a minute or two, kissed my forehead. She told me it would be all right. Then she took my machine gun, throwing it up on her shoulder with a grunt. In a few minutes Inez Trujillo came up, she and the rest of the squad. With hardly a word they took my pack apart; splitting up my gear among them. They hung the empty pack on my back. Trujillo told two of the girls – Isabel and Catarina – to help me. They got on either side of me and put my arms over their shoulders.

If Garcia even noticed or cared he never let on. He just called us to attention, gave us a “left face,” took his position at the front, and ordered us to march.

The first few miles were bad, but I still had a little strength in me; just enough to keep going. The next nine or ten miles were worse, because I didn’t have that strength left by then, but I couldn’t drop out after having let the other girls put themselves through hell having to carry me for the first few miles. Funny thing, pride, no?

I don't like to think about that march too often. It was bad. Half the time I was nearly delirious. Most of the rest I was puking. The girls helping me didn’t say a bad word even when I threw up right on them, though the stench made them start to gag, too.

Now you might say those women did nothing special; that if they hadn’t taken my gear willingly, Garcia would have made them. That’s true, they had to carry my equipment if I couldn’t.

But they didn’t have to carry me. That they did on their own.

It’s hard not to love a group like that.

*****

There was a funny upshot of that incident. Without a word of explanation Garcia had us turn in those miserable poles, the “pricks,” the next day. They were carried away on a truck. He never reissued them. We never gave him cause to.

Fortunately, we spent the next four days in the same general area, learning how to conduct raid, ambush and reconnaissance patrols. We did make some cross-country moves, but they were fairly short moves; without heavy packs.

Mostly, they left me behind to help secure the Objective Rally Point, or ORP. That’s the last position where your patrol – usually squad or platoon sized – stops, short of the actual place where you set up the ambush or do the recon or raid.

If I hadn’t been sick, it might have been fun. I know most of the other girls thought it was. Though, by then, they would probably have to be considered a little weird. Being in the ORP wasn’t so bad. Still, I was usually alone.

Actually, I hoped I was alone. There was always the chance of a snake showing up to keep me company. I hate snakes. And the antaniae? The moonbats? I am frankly scared to death of them. The thought of one crawling into my sleeping roll with me is enough to pull me to my feet, shivering, no matter how tired I am. As soon as I was remotely able to keep up I insisted that I not be left behind in the ORP anymore. If the other girls thought that was because I was tough, I did nothing to disabuse them of the notion.

*****

It was early one morning, following a less than fully successful ambush and while we waited for chow, that I cornered Trujillo. The others, especially Marta, Cat and Isabel, I’d already expressed my gratitude to.

“Inez...thank you,” was all I said.

She just shook her head, as if she didn’t quite understand.

“For carrying me. For getting the others to carry me.” I looked down at the ground, ashamed, actually.

“Wouldn’t you have done the same for us?”

I don't know if I would have before, I really don’t. But I nodded, as if I was certain I would have.

“So what’s to thank? We’re in this together. We help each other.”

The subject was a little uncomfortable. I changed it. “Why are you here, Inez? I mean...I joined to try to build a better life for myself and my daughter. But why did you join?”

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” was all she said.

“There was a man,” I reminded her, “back when we first got on the hovercraft to come here. He was something special to you? A boyfriend? A lover?”

She looked confused for a minute, then started to laugh. “Lover? Ricardo is my brother! He’s in Third Tercio. He’s probably at Centurion School now.”

“Are you going to try for that? Centurion, I mean.”

“I’ll take what they offer me, if they offer me anything,” she answered.

“They will. You’re different from the rest of us, different from me, for example.”

“Maria,” she said, with a subtle smile, “do you think we carried you and your gear because we thought you were worthless?”

I really didn’t know what to say to that.

*****

Somewhere nearby artillery was falling and exploding. Garcia paid it no mind, though it made the rest of us pretty nervous.

He said, “Many armies spend an inordinate effort, I understand, on limiting the effects of friendly fire. We don’t spend much. We’re soldiers. We’re there to be killed if the country needed us to be killed. We’re there to win, even if doing so gets us killed.

“You might not expect it to be true, but it is true, that the infantry only inflicts twenty or thirty percent of all casualties in battle. We take, on the other hand, about ninety percent of the casualties. Who kills us? The enemy artillery. Who among us does the killing? The machine guns. What kills or suppresses the machine gunners? Your own artillery.”

Garcia pulled a tetradrachma coin from his pocket and flipped it to illustrate. “Now you have a choice. You can stay so far behind your own supporting artillery that there is no chance of any of your own being hit by it. If you do, the enemy machine gunners will be up and firing when you attack. Two years into the Great Global War, there was an attack. Twenty-five thousand Anglians were killed, as many more wounded, on the first day alone, by a few dozen machine gunners that hadn’t been suppressed or destroyed by the Anglian artillery.”

He flipped the coin again. “On the other hand, you can follow your own artillery so closely that you take some losses in dead and wounded from your own side. Quality control at the factory – or lack thereof – ensures that if you follow a barrage closely, some shells will fall short among your own troops. But then, you can be on top of the machine guns, shooting, stabbing, hacking and blasting before they have a chance to mow your people down.”

His face took on a somber, serious cast. “How sad for those killed by their own side’s artillery.” The frown disappeared, replaced by a rare and ghastly grin. “How grand, however, for those likely much larger numbers not killed by the enemy machine guns. And the dead don’t really care what killed them.

“We go in for the second approach, taking losses to ‘friendly fire’ somewhat more philosophically than the world norm. It takes a lot of discipline, though, and that means a lot of training. Some of that can be inferential training, general discipline building. It’s better, though, if the training is a little more direct and pointed. Move out.”

*****

I was scared to death. Garcia wasn’t just flapping his gums about following a barrage closely. He wanted us to do it.

“Madre de Dios! Did you see that?” Marta stopped short, slack-jawed, to see a woman sail about fifteen feet into the air, arms and legs fluttering. The woman landed, stunned, it appeared, but otherwise fairly whole, a few meters from where a delay-fused shell had gone off not too far from under her feet. The woman was lucky the shell had missed her head before burying itself in the ground.

“Don’t think about it,” Cristina Zamora shouted. “Just keep marching forward. Forward!” Zamora was acting platoon centurion for the exercise.

About seventy-five meters ahead of where Marta and I stood, a wall of flying dirt moved relentlessly up a steep hill. They were firing delay fuses, but that was the only safety measure I could see, that kicked up a visually impressive amount of dirt and rocks with each burst.

We resumed walking forward, firing short bursts either from the hip or, shoulder held, aiming with the F- and M-26’s neat little integral optical sight. Look, anything you can throw at the enemy to keep his head down is worth the effort. Besides, walking is a lot faster and less exhausting than doing little three second rushes. In battle, an exhausted Amazona is a fear-filled and useless Amazona.

As we neared the top of the hill, the shell fire shifted a last time and redoubled in intensity. Zamora spoke into a radio, then shouted, “Wait for it!”

The delay fused high explosive was replaced by a dozen rounds of white phosphorus. A cloud of smoke enveloped the hilltop.

“Adelante las Amazonas!” We charged, screaming and firing all the way.

*****

For whatever reasons, and each of us probably had her own, we did develop something like esprit de corps. Or, rather, most of us did. A few couldn’t. Life for them became very hard, because, as the overwhelming bulk of us still remaining bonded together, the others were left out in the cold. Some were encouraged into the group by that. Others just shut down before being washed out.

Probably no one suffered more from this than Gloria. I guess she was so used to being the center of attention that she just couldn’t take being cut out. Cut out, however, she certainly was. Oh, she tried to pretend that she felt what we felt. I’ll tell you something, though; we women are much better judges of character than men are. Gloria fooled no one.

She took to hanging around one of the Corporal-Instructors, Corporal Salazar. Salazar’s partner, Sergeant Castro, noticed, eventually. I remember a screaming match that ended only when Centurion Franco knocked them both silly.

It was about that time that Gloria stopped being put on shit detail.

I guess Salazar wasn’t entirely gay. Eventually, he and Gloria were caught engaged in...shall we say...an indiscretion. Maybe the worst part is that Castro’s the one who caught them. Maybe, if Castro hadn’t been so upset, he might have kept it to himself. He was a good man, ordinarily, a lot kinder than most.

Some of us were selected to sit in on the courts-martial, just to witness, not to sit the board. Salazar just sat, mute. Gloria kept begging for the chance to resign. It was too late. Castro wept a lot, as quietly as he could. I felt sorry for him.

The two were each charged with mutiny and aggravated fraternization. Salazar was further charged with aggravated abuse of office (improper sexual relations) and adultery; Gloria with conduct tending to contribute to the demoralization of the Legion and adultery. (Did I mention that the partnerships in Gorgidas were treated as legal marriages in the Legion?)

The evidence was pretty damned overwhelming. Castro had seen them. There was some semen from Salazar on Gloria’s uniform. It had obviously not been rape, though Gloria tried to claim it had been. I think what ruined that defense is that Gloria still had her teeth and, under the particular circumstances, could have been expected to use them to considerable effect, had it really been rape or, more technically, forcible sodomy. Besides, we were supposed to be real soldiers, ready to fight and die. How could one of us hope to claim rape if she’d been conscious but hadn’t fought to death or, at least, incapacitation or been physically overwhelmed by sheer brute force? What was true of civilian women could never really be true for us.

Mutiny? When two or more soldiers combine to suborn good order and discipline in the armed forces, that is mutiny. Salazar and Gloria made two. They were certainly...ah...combined, at the time. The predictable effect of sexual relations between people of substantially different ranks is to suborn good order and discipline. We are responsible for the predictable effects of our actions just as if we intended them. There was no evidence put on that Salazar or Gloria had any defensible reason to believe this would not be the effect if discovered, nor that they would not be discovered (though disbelief in discovery was no defense anyway). So: Mutiny.

The penalty is death. As a matter of fact, failure to report or suppress a mutiny by any means – including summary execution – is also punished by death. I guess poor Castro didn’t have a lot of choice. If he’d shot them both on the spot he’d probably have been commended.

Unfortunately, he didn’t. When the verdicts and sentence came back they were, “Guilty on all counts” and “Death by Musketry,” respectively. It took less than twenty-four hours for Carrera to confirm the sentences. There was no appeal, certainly not to an ignorant civil court. The President of the Republic could have intervened, had he so chosen. He did not so choose.

We made up the firing squads ourselves, for Gloria, while the Tercio Gorgidas provided the one for Salazar. They were picked, not volunteers. None of us would have volunteered, even if we didn’t like Gloria. We couldn’t refuse the order, either. Some tribune from Gorgidas that I’d never seen before commanded both. The firing squads stood nervously in ranks as the prisoners were marched out of their cells. I understand that of the twelve rifles, two had only blanks in them. That was so the girls and gays who’d been picked to execute the sentences could console themselves that – just maybe – they hadn’t really been shooting.

The sky was that shade of deep blue you see just before sunrise. Many times in training I had thrilled to wake up, stand and stretch, and feel the planet come alive around me at just that hour. I didn’t feel any thrill now, though. Those of us not in the firing parties stood in formation to one side to witness. I shook. I doubt I was alone.

Salazar took it fairly well. He marched out to the wall under guard but also under his own power. He stumbled, once, but that was just the darkness. Salazar shook his head “No” when he was offered the blindfold (a mistake, by the way; people who are going to shoot you in cold blood get nervous if you’re looking at them. Nervous people don't shoot well.).

Gloria had to be carried; tied, and screaming all the way. While Salazar was allowed to stand, and given a cigarette to smoke (yes, we really do that for these things), Gloria was trussed up to a stake. She kept squirming, though. A sergeant pasted aiming markers over each of their hearts, after bending his head to listen for the heartbeat. Salazar shouted out to Castro, “I’m sorry!”

Some large flood lights were lit on the order of Tribune Silva. The Gorgidas tribune shouted, “Ready,” and the firing squads lifted their rifles parallel to the ground... “Aim,” and the muzzles shifted imperceptibly...then “Fire!” There was a sound like a single shot, but longer.

I saw fluid (blood, I suppose) and bits of flesh shoot from out of their backs to spatter against the wall behind them. Salazar was thrown back against the stake, then fell to the ground. The impact of the bullets twisted Gloria half way around her stake. She slumped against the ropes that bound her to it. They were both still breathing; we could see that by the flood lights. Salazar seemed unconscious but alive. Gloria was trying to scream, but only blood and an occasional faint “coo” that was probably her best effort at a shriek, came out of her mouth.

The junior tribune ordered the firing parties to, “Order arms.” Then he marched to Salazar and shot him, once, in the back of the head, behind his ear. Unlike the members of a firing squad, there are no blanks for the officer commanding them. If you can’t kill you have no business being an officer. Salazar convulsed, then stopped breathing. The tribune walked a few more steps, took aim, and shot Gloria the same way. Her body shuddered violently but the cooing that passed for shrieking stopped. It was a mercy.

Garcia marched us away. We didn’t sing as we marched. I know I felt sick. I doubt I was alone in that. That night Marta cried herself to sleep on my shoulder.

Castro hanged himself from the limb of a tree a week later.

Was it right, what they did to those two? I’ve asked myself that question for many years now.

It was such a small thing in itself; what Gloria and Salazar did, I mean. Oh, sure, one or two of us might have pulled an extra shit detail because Gloria had been selling herself for consideration. (Or maybe it would be better said – more charitably said – that she’d been given consideration for giving herself. Didn’t matter, the effect was the same in either case.) Still, I’d have gladly pulled an extra detail or two if it would have spared me having to watch their deaths. I didn’t like the bitch, not even a little bit, or Salazar either. But I sure didn’t want them dead.

Franco called us together after Castro hanged himself, to talk to us. He was ready to puke himself; you could see that. Maybe he was talking to convince himself; I wouldn’t know. But there were tears in his eyes. I am certain of that.

“I remember an old line,” he began, “something about military justice being to justice as military music is to music. It’s both true and false. For one thing, military music can be of a fairly high artistic order, if art is that which causes emotional catharsis. Listen to Beethoven’s Yorckische Marsch sometime, if you don’t believe me; or Boinas Azules Cruzan la Frontera played on war pipes.

“The saying is true, though, in another respect. Military music serves primarily the cause of battle and so does military justice. It is concerned with the rights and privileges of individuals only to the extent that they may also serve the cause of battle. Battle in turn serves the cause of the country. The country, too, has an interest in winning as cheaply as possible, in terms of human life. Next generation’s quota of cannon fodder has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?

“Well doesn’t it?” He sounded imploring. I think maybe Salazar may have been a friend. Or Castro…maybe both.

“So maybe the question isn’t whether it was just to have shot those two for such a trivial affair. Maybe the question is whether it would have been injustice to the country – which is to say, injustice also to the country’s soldiers, which is to say you and I – not to have shot them.

“Maybe you think the Court should have been lenient. Let’s suppose the court-martial board had been lenient. Suppose – despite the evidence – it had not found them guilty of mutiny. They could have received sentences of between twenty-five years, for Gloria, and forty years, for Salazar, on the other charges alone; all of that, by the way, being at hard labor, or until they died of it. Prison in this country is roughly analogous to state slavery, after all.”

Franco paused, as if not sure to continue. He did continue, though.

“Well, maybe Salazar wasn’t the only one of your trainers capable of having an interest in a woman. Hell, I used to have a girlfriend myself. Yeah, it was a long time ago. These things are often relative, not absolute. And maybe Gloria wasn’t the only one of us who might have...given herself for consideration. So, don’t you see? We had to shoot them. We had to.”

I thought about that then…I do so still. Truthfully, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have done what Gloria did. Yes, it was that rough sometimes. In fact, the only ones in my platoon I am sure wouldn’t have were Inez Trujillo and Cristina Zamora – they were just too completely soldierly and decent – and Marta. Though she had her own reasons.

“Does it matter,” Franco continued, “if a leader is sleeping with a troop? Does it make a difference to an armed force that its leaders are treating some of its troops unfairly because they are sleeping with others? Will those troops being discriminated against have equal faith in their leaders when they suspect that those same leaders care a lot more for some other troops than they do for them? When we’re talking about instincts and feelings, does it even matter if the suspicion is valid or merely conjecture?

“There is some justice in equally shared dangers in war. How does a soldier take it when she might be going on an exceptionally dangerous night patrol so some other troop can warm his or her squad leader’s bed that same night? How about the third or fourth time they have to go on a really bad mission that ought go to the squad leader’s playmate?

“Oh, yes. Of course, once a war starts we’ll forget all the unofficial lessons we learned in peacetime about our leaders and the way they do business. Right. Of course.

“And I’m the Queen of Anglia.” Franco shook his head.

“No, Salazar betrayed you and us, both. It was maybe a small betrayal, but it was real. And you would have lost faith not just in him, but – to an extent – in all your leaders, then and in the future, if he’d gotten away with it.”

I suppose he was right about that. No, I know he was.

“And the woman? She was actually fairly capable in a lot of ways. She was quite bright. Her political instincts were obviously pretty high, too. She’d sure known where to give – or sell – herself to the greatest effect. Imagine if she’d actually made it past training. Imagine a unit of the tercio led by her. Who might have been next on her list of acquisitions? What would the rest of the girls have felt if Gloria had made high rank based on de facto prostitution while they struggled along just trying to be good soldiers? How long would the rest of you have kept trying, do you suppose?

“Then, too, she’d also betrayed Castro, another soldier; a comrade, who had a right to expect loyalty from any other soldier in the Legion. Forget about Castro killing himself a week later. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, he would never again have been the same soldier he had been.

“A pretty good one, by the way. A decent human being, too.”

*****

I think about those executions quite often, even now. I’m sorry they had to be done. I’m not sorry they were done.

Of course, the Legions have nothing against sex, per se. I have it on pretty reliable authority from a woman who knew Duque Carrera in much his younger days that he was something of a satyr. Presidente Parilla was worse. Most male leaders are married and many keep a mistress, too. There’s no law against it. Most Amazon leaders are married or living with someone of an appropriate rank. And the Legions absolutely only care about adultery that really is to the detriment of good order and discipline; with a comrade’s spouse or partner, typically, or an underling. A trooper can screw the world and the Legion won’t care unless it hurts the Legion.

Get caught screwing someone you oughtn’t, however, and go to the wall. No excuses.

And if there’s no chance of your ever going to go into a battle, you have as much right to comment on that as a man does to comment on a woman’s right to an abortion. Some, not much.

So, yes, we can play, more or less like real people. That doesn’t mean someone can play with us without permission, though.

*****

Last of all the clothing issues they made to us, we were issued our parade dress uniforms. The uniform is still the same, even after all these years. Kilts.

I’ve always thought that made sense. They’re warlike. It can’t be said that kilts are really either masculine or feminine. They look good on both sexes. And they are distinctly more flattering to women than shapeless skirts or baggy trousers. I understand Carrera (one of his aides, I imagine, on his – our – behalf) applied all the way to Taurus for a particular tartan – that’s the pattern of plaid – for us. Carrera even went ahead and changed our unit name from Thirty-sixth Tercio Amazona to Thirty-sixth Tercio Amazona (Montañera) in case the Highlanders might object to kilts on other than highland troops.

We did, by the way, get some mountain training, though we honestly weren’t anything like as capable as Fifth Mountain Tercio. I’m sure there are women out there who could match the Montañeros, or even outdo some of them, in mountain climbing, just as there are women who can run, ski, swim, what have you, better than the average man. Do you have any idea how much time those world class women athletes, or any women who excel at some physical activity, have to spend on their sports? Even the naturally gifted ones we like to hold up as examples spend most of their waking hours in exercise. That just isn’t practical for a soldier; there’s too much else to do.

The other thing is that kilts – light ones, like ours – are very practical and healthy for women in a hot, muggy climate like we have. The uniform included all the other items of regalia that go with kilts, basket weave handled dirk high among them.

Towards graduation from basic we were allowed a couple of thirty-six hour passes. It isn’t generous and isn’t intended to be. What it really is, is a half reward and half re-assimilation into civil life for those not going to go on to a leadership school. None of us knew, as of yet, who would be going on- and upward, though we made some educated guesses.

A thirty-six hour pass doesn’t get you much. You’re not allowed to leave the island, even though you could make it to the City and back in theory. But you can catch a movie that isn’t either propaganda or training, you can eat a civilized meal at one of the three or four little towns on the island, you can visit the museum at the main cantonment area. You can go swimming or sunbathing on one of the beaches. You can even go dancing, there are a couple of clubs for the recruits, beer only. You can phone home, if you’re willing to wait an hour to get to a pay phone.

I called Porras to speak to Alma.

She asked me in her little voice, “Mommy? Is it really you?”

“Yes, Baby,” my heart leapt, “Yes it’s me.”

We couldn’t talk long, there being a long line of women behind me waiting to phone their own loved ones. But I did get to find out that Alma now knew her ABC’s, could add up to five plus five, and really, really wanted to know if the Gonzalez children could live with us when I came home.

*****

A half dozen of us elected to go dancing one Saturday night. Trujillo was somewhat reluctant, but went along to keep an eye on us. She was like that.

We boarded a bus – one ran around “Perimeter Road” every fifteen minutes – and headed for Main Post, near the airfield. It stopped probably thirty times outside one or another of the little camps, like Botchkareva, that littered the island. The bus dropped us off right outside the Enlisted Club there on Main Post.

There was a kilted Amazona that I didn’t know except by sight waiting outside. She wasn’t in tears, but you could tell by the sound of her voice that she really wanted to be, and might have been but for her training. Inez asked what was wrong.

“I came here by myself,” she said. “And they...grabbed me” – she pointed to her buttocks and breasts – “and laughed about it. Bastards.”

“I see,” Inez said, without inflection. “I see.”

She turned towards the main door to the club, took a deep breath, and walked forward. We followed her in. She must have known we would.

Do men really act that way with a little beer in them? There were two long lines of staggering drunkards, one on either side of the hallway. Through some wide doors I could see a number of privates lined up along the top of the bar. They were making gestures and echoing commands that, I’d guess, were what troops about to jump out of airplanes did. Not far from the bar someone had pushed together four tables in the shape of a shallow ‘T’. A chair sat on the leg of the ‘t’. One really inebriated sot – he was probably eighteen or nineteen – was waving napkins in his hands. One by one a bunch of the others, arms outstretched like airplane wings, would run up to the long top of the ‘t’ and either do a belly flop and slide along it (someone had thoughtfully poured beer over the surfaces of the tables to make them effectively frictionless) or veer off and rejoin an almost unbelievably stupid looking circle of others, all of them likewise imitating planes.

I really shouldn’t criticize those boys. I once, years later, took my girls to a male striptease. Women can be, if anything, at least equally silly under the right circumstances.

I’d guess that the word had gone out that the Amazonas were on pass. The boys along the corridor were waiting for us. I won’t repeat their comments, they were demeaning and, under the circumstances, very, very unlikely.

The boys began to chant and clap their hands in time. Unfazed, Trujillo walked forward as if they weren’t even there. She walked, that is, until one of them tried to reach a hand under her kilt. (Old joke: Is anything worn under a kilt? Answer: No, everything is in perfect working order.)

I’m pretty good with a knife. Inez was something else. She had drawn her dirk and slashed the boy’s arm nearly to the bone in far less time than it takes to tell about it. One-armed, she pushed the gasping boy against the wall, then pinned the offending hand to the paneling with the dirk. Then she stood there in the middle of the hallway, arms folded and calm as could be, and asked, “Who’s next, boys? You?” she pointed at one with her chin. “How about you two? Why not all at once? Come on, you’re big and strong, you can take on little ol’ me. Of course, it might get a little messy.”

By that time the rest of us had our dirks out, stroking them, and were standing close behind Inez.

I have never seen so nonplussed a group of slack-jawed, bug-eyed men in my life. It must have come as quite a shock.

Finally, one of them, maybe a little less drunk than the rest, said “Cortizo, get an ambulance for Hernandez. Don’t call the MP’s.”

To us he said, “You are obviously not who we were waiting for. Pass, Ladies.” His voice added the capitalization.

Inez pulled the dagger from the wall, cleaned it on the boy’s uniform, and resheathed it. He fell to the floor when she released his shirt. Then we walked into the dance area unmolested.

Barbaric, no, having to actually fight for one’s dignity? Why shouldn’t Inez have left it to the law to preserve minimal respect for our persons? Weren’t we entitled?

Sister, in this world you’re not entitled to anything that isn’t bought and paid for, and then only if you can defend it. I have no doubt that we could have called the MP’s. I also have no doubt that we could have ruined the lives of some young men whose only fault was stupidity and immaturity. (I’m glad we didn’t. A number of those boys gave all they had, later on, for our good and the country’s. You can forgive a lot in someone who died for the country...and for you.)

Then, too, if we had, they would have despised us for it. Maybe that boy Inez slashed and pinned hated us afterwards. Or maybe not, men are funny about wounds. They often don’t mind a scar or two. And they’ve got a sense of justice, most of them, that can accept being slugged when they deserve it. But hated or not, those boys at least knew we were like them, soldiers, warriors.

I think Inez did more for us in that moment than anyone ever had or would.

The dancing itself was pretty uneventful. Only a few boys had the courage to ask one of us. I can’t recall that any of us declined. But, much like them, we were mostly too bashful to ask. Silly, no?

Some of them had a drinking contest going on, off in a corner. They didn’t invite us and we had no interest in joining. We did, however, watch as – one by one – the boys passed out, semi-comatose. I didn’t envy them their hangovers in the morning.

Though the spirit of the competition I found intriguing. We didn’t do that sort of thing.

The Amazon Legion (Chapter 5) by Tom Kratman

Navigation Links for The Amazon Legion: 

Prelude & Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6


Chapter Five


What does not destroy us, strengthens us.

--Nietzsche


It seemed that Size Did Matter.

No matter how the Gorgidas trained them; no matter how hard the women tried; it looked like they were never, never, never going to be quite (read: nearly) as strong as even an average group of men. They couldn’t march as far; as fast; or carrying as heavy a load. All the will in the world didn’t make a gnat’s ass of difference. Technology didn’t help much either; it’s a truism that, in total, modern high technology had not succeeded in reducing by so much as half an ounce the load on a foot soldier’s back, just the opposite. Caesar’s centurions would have mutinied over some of the loads a foot soldier of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had to carry, on Old Earth, and things had not turned out any differently on Terra Nova. Too intent on seeing only what it wanted to see, modern, egalitarian feminism simply refused to see that.

Still, there were some compensating factors.

When the final scores were tallied it turned out the women actually were better shots, on average, than men. That wasn’t entirely a natural phenomenon. Their ammunition allocation had been twice that of male recruits. The women spent about twice as much time on the rifle range as the men did. This was true for all classes of training ammunition: the women had twice as many hand grenades to throw, twice as many anti-tank rocket rounds, twice as many pounds of demolitions.

Carrera had put out the word before the tercio had even been formed: if the women couldn’t carry as much they had to make better use of what they could carry. And that meant more training, which meant more ammunition for training.

He had helped them in other ways too. All the men were issued jungle boots; canvas, plastic and leather. Carrera spent a lot of money on lighter weight footwear for the women, more or less high top sneakers, though they looked about the same. Their rucksacks? The same story. The rest of the force made do with standard, heavy packs. After the first few weeks, the women were given better; the latest in carbon fiber frames with hip belts to take some of the load off their shoulders.

Still, there wasn’t much that could be done with most of the equipment. Radios were heavy, a big surprise for those who’d never carried one for twenty miles. The same was true for night vision devices and the batteries to run them. And Carrera was adamant; the women were not going to be assigned men to do the heavy work for them; it was all on themselves, sink or swim.

Machine guns? They had what everybody else had for a light machine gun; the M-26. This was a good gun though it went through ammunition at an incredible rate. The Amazons had to have them, or something just like them. A real machine gun can be made lighter but it needs to fire a heavy, high power bullet to do its job. Putting a heavy bullet in a light machine gun makes it damned hard to fire, nearly impossible to keep on target. And if men had trouble controlling the M-26 – and they sometimes did – it could only have been worse for women, being not as heavy or strong, to control something that, being lighter, kicked even worse.

The heavier .34 and .41 caliber machine guns were almost impossibly heavy, between themselves, their tripods, and their brass-cased ammunition. Of course, the .41 caliber guns were too heavy for men to tote, also.

Water weighs the same for everyone. And the women needed about as much of it.

The biggest thing Carrera did to help them was, eventually, to make their squads and platoons bigger than the men’s. Fourteen or more women per squad compared to eleven for the men, not even counting the overstrength the Tercio Amazona would have later on to allow some women to take maternity leave.

Of course, since an infantry unit’s firepower is mostly in its heavy weapons, and since the Amazons had just the same number of heavy weapons as a man’s unit did, one could say that they weren’t such a bargain. The government had to pay an Amazon squad almost thirty percent more than it did a squad of men, for no greater firepower.

But all the things done to try to cut down on the women’s load just compensated – and that only partly – for lack of physical strength. If they were going to make it in a traditionally male world – the world of war – they had to be stronger in character than men to make up for being weaker in body. And firepower wasn’t everything…there’s heart, too.

*****

“Cocksuckers,” Marta said, under her breath as she lifted another shovelful of dirt out of the fighting position she and Maria were building. She meant the corporals, sergeants and centurions, of course. “How many fucking holes do they fucking think we have to fucking dig to know how to dig a fucking hole?”

Not more than two hundred meters away both Franco and Garcia, along with five or six sergeants and corporals, were clustered around a big bunker, a real concrete bomb shelter. A couple more corporals stood to either side of the platoon position. These corporals, likewise, were just lounging around. The cadre were leaving the women pretty much alone, just watching quietly from a distance.

Later, all the women would curse themselves for not catching the hint that something really special was planned. In fairness though, most were too tired to think about much besides the blisters on their hands and their aching backs. These were much more significant than some holes, maybe eight inches in diameter, that dotted the ground they were digging into. Even the heavy-duty cables that ran from the big bunker to the holes remained unremarked.

The women were supposed to be preparing to defend against an attack by tanks, supported by artillery. They’d even been issued anti-tank munitions and mines – training types that wouldn’t really kill a tank but made a flash and bang and some smoke – and some dummy satchel charges.

With a grunt Cat and Maria dropped the log they’d been carrying next to Maria’s and Marta’s fighting position. They would much preferred to have chopped up their “pricks” for the overhead cover. There was no chance of that, though.

Maria had heard Marta. It would have been hard not to have heard. She took a labored breath before answering; “How many? I guess until we do it right.”

Cat and Maria then turned back towards the woods to get another log for the hole Cat shared with Inez.

“Cocksuckers,” Marta repeated.

Over her shoulder, Maria called, “That’s no big secret, Marta...and this distinguishes them from you and I precisely how?” Cat giggled.

Marta just grunted with the strain of another load of dirt.

When Maria came back, she took Marta’s place on the shovel while Marta and Inez went for more logs. The women spent the better part of the day like that, switching off digging and cutting and carrying. Eventually, they had all built pretty fair fighting positions. They even had solid overhead cover.

It was just after an early evening chow that Centurion Garcia blew his whistle and called them together.

Marta figured that it would be just another ass chewing for not building their positions as perfectly as Garcia thought they should be.

Marta was wrong.

“We have a special treat for you today, ladies,” Garcia began. All the women shivered when he said it. “Ladies” meant something very bad was in store.

“In about ten minutes you had better be in those holes you dug, and you’d better pray your overhead cover is good. Because we’re going to shell you silly and then some tanks are going to try to crush those little logs and bury you alive….of course we’ll dig you out if there’s time but…..”

He blew his whistle again and those corporals on either side of the platoon began to run through the area. A couple of jeeps followed. The corporals were pulling igniters and tossing charges to either side. Some of the corporals were placing smaller charges – maybe one pounders, or a little more – on top of and around every fighting position the women had built. Some charges were on fuse delay, others they hooked up to leads running from the thick cables.

“No,” Garcia answered the unasked question. “I said ‘shell’ and I meant with real artillery. The other stuff is cheaper, though, so we’re supplementing the shells with regular demo charges. Now get to your holes. And remember what you’ve been taught about taking out tanks.” Beckoning to his followers, Garcia began to walk nonchalantly to the big bunker.

Maria and Marta exchanged wide eyed looks. Then the women ran for their lives.

“And don’t move my demo charges,” Garcia called to their fleeing backs.

Maria and Marta were almost to their holes when the first shells landed; maybe one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred meters to their front. There were only three of them, three shell bursts spewing ugly, ragged columns of earth into the air. Even though muffled by subsurface detonation, the blasts made Maria’s insides ripple in a way that was both indescribable and very, very unpleasant. The sensation made Marta want to throw up, and she was used to having her internal organs pushed around some.

By the time they had squeezed through the rear entrance ports and fallen in a tangled heap at the hole’s muddy bottom there were another six explosions – closer; they could feel that. Then came nine more, closer still. After those three volleys, each one getting closer to them, a different firing battery took over. The women neither knew nor cared who was pounding them. In fact, the first had been 85 millimeter guns. The ones who took over fired 122 millimeter shells, nine per volley. These last were also firing on delay fuses: they went off after sinking a few feet into the ground. If one had actually been permitted to land near one of the women’s holes the dirt sides would have been blown in on them which would probably have proven fatal.

The cadre did this to give the women the illusion of fire coming closer and closer. In fact none of the guns ever fired any closer than seventy-five meters. Which was still dangerous. Part of the danger was mitigated by having the guns fire from the side, parallel to the women’s line of fighting positions.

Unseen, Garcia nodded to Franco. Franco turned a safety key in a large metal battery box and began flipping little switches. With each flip of a switch one or a number of demolition charges started going off around the women. In their holes they cried and quivered and vomited and – more than a few – shit themselves. Marta screamed when a one pound charge atop the little bunker went off. So did Maria.

Once the demo charges had almost all been fired the guns split their fire so that half was falling behind the women, half in front. Then, as the last of the demolitions, the ones that were on slow burning fuses, were going off, all the fire shifted to fall behind them.

By then Marta had started to cry, great hopeless wracking sobs. She blubbered a lot of things, too, that she probably wished she hadn’t…private things. She took a sniff and sobbed too about the smell of feces wafting up from her soiled uniform.

The really bad part, though, was when she tried to run away.

Marta didn’t just have bigger breasts than most; she was big in general, strong, too. Maria saw her start to scramble out of their hole. For a minute – it seemed like an eternity but may have been only half a second: a minute is fair compromise – Maria just froze. Then she grabbed Marta’s combat harness and held on for dear life: Marta’s.

Marta fought, she struggled. She called Maria just about every name in the book.

Hanging onto Marta’s combat harness, Maria screamed, “Stupid bitch, I am NOT letting you go out into that!”

Finally, Marta just collapsed, sobbing again, saying over and over that she was sorry. And the two held each other, there in the bottom of that muddy stinking hole in the Earth, as the “barrage” seemed to roll on past them.

Between blasts Maria bantered in Marta’s ear, “You know how time flies”…KABOOM… “when you’re having fun? Well”… KABOOM….”it can really drag when”….KABOOM….. “you’re having no fun at all”…. KABOOM…. “This barrage can’t”…KABOOM…. “have lasted as long as five minutes, maybe six at the outside”…..KABOOM…. “but it seems longer doesn’t it?” Marta paid no attention.

Then Maria heard the tanks... barely.

*****

Tanks are impressive, no doubt about it. And any soldier who wants to die in her sleep will treat them with a healthy respect. But they can be beaten. The women had already been taught how.

*****

“Yes,” that instructor had told them the previous week, “tanks are bigger than you. They’re faster than you. They’ve got more firepower than you. And they’ve got a lot more protection than the shirts you girls are wearing.”

“But let me tell you a little secret: tanks – their crews, I mean – are as afraid of you as you are of them. Trust me, I’m a tanker. I know.”

The instructor looked over the platoon and singled out Inez, it was always a great entertainment for him to see how it was the little ones who liked tanks the most. “Come up here, young lady.” All the others gaped in disbelief when he reached a hand down to help her up. That was something their usual instructors would never do, implying as it did the possibility those girls really were human beings.

“Young lady,” the instructor asked, “how thick is the armor on top of this tank?”

Inez looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Well, reach in through the hatch and try to feel how far apart your hands are when the armor is between them.” She did and then announced that the top armor was no more than a half inch thick. He had her do the same with the side of the turret, which was several times thicker, but still not all that thick.

“That’s the first weakness: our real armor is only in front. On the sides, the rear, the top deck; the armor is positively weak. Oh, sure; it’s good enough to keep shell fragments and bullets out. But a shaped charge in the hands of a good grunt will blow a hole right through; causing our wives and children to receive a ‘With deepest sorrow’ letter from Presidente Parilla. That’s why we insist on having our own infantry in close support; to take care of enemy grunts; at least keep their damned heads down.”

“That should give you a hint. What’s the first thing you have to take care of to defeat tanks? You, girl.” He pointed at Maria.

“The enemy’s infantry?” she ventured.

“Right in one. But why?”

“So they can’t shoot us when we go after the tanks.”

“Almost right, chica. But your answer implies that it’s their guns that protect the tanks. That’s only partly right. I’ll give you another hint. What’s the most important part of your body when using your rifle?”
He gave her a few seconds to think. She went down the list of organs and senses but rejected most of them outright. Finally Maria had it narrowed down to her trigger finger and her eyes, then decided that eyes were more important. She said so.

“Just so Private...?”

“Fuentes, Centurion. Maria Fuentes.”

“Private Fuentes. You are just right. Because that is the big weakness on the tank. We can’t see shit from inside those things. Strip off our infantry; cut out most of our eyes; cut out the ability to get precise fire in small doses to protect ourselves.”

She didn’t really pay perfect attention to what he said next; she was marveling that a man in uniform and authority had just called her something besides bitch or twat, or lady in a tone that implied the same thing.

“... are particularly vulnerable. That’s something that hasn’t improved a bit since the Great Global War. The same charge – satchel or land mine – that would break the treads on a tank of sixty years ago will do the same to a tank today.

“And the engines? We aren’t submarines. Tanks require oxygen in vast quantities to keep the engines going; oxygen that has to come from the air around us. Cut that off; we stop dead. Then you can kill us; because a tank that isn’t moving is dead meat to good infantry.

“Okay, move into the classroom behind you.”

Maria hesitated…which the centurion saw. “Something bothering you, chica?”

She stood to attention, hesitated, then asked, “Centurion…how come you are so…ah…polite to us? No one else has been.”

He smiled briefly, then answered, “You aren’t going to my unit, girl. So I have nothing against any of you. So what does a little politeness cost? It might be different if there was some chance that you women might be mixed in with regular, male organizations. I understand that in the armies that have tried that there is often a vast resentment of women soldiers on the part of the men, partly because the men end up doing nearly twice as much heavy work, and partly because some women will…ah…sell themselves, frankly. But you girls? You’re not going to harm me or mine any.”

“Oh…I see.”

“Yes. Now trot your cute little buns into the classroom.”

“Si, Centurio.” She smiled fetchingly; the habits of a lifetime die hard. The Centurion smiled back until a warning glance from Garcia, standing nearby, turned his face to a scowl.

“Now GO, girl.” Maria went.

In the classroom the women were shown a film, Hombres Contra Tanques. Men Against Tanks. This work showed a number of interesting ways to earn a medal for valor, most likely posthumously. Then the women had to go through a number of those ways themselves, using small charges, gasoline bombs – they were told those were called “Molotov Cocktails” – mines and more formal anti-tank weapons.

Inez had taken considerable interest in the film. Cat had said, “Uh, uh.” Perhaps she thought she had a choice.

*****

The girls waited in holes for tanks to run over them, then leapt up to toss satchel charges on their decks. Yes, they were very, very small satchel charges, with several pounds of dirt added to make them as heavy as the real thing. As the charges were heavy, it took a fair amount of practice to learn to swing them just right by their straps.

In pairs they used ropes to pull practice mines back and forth across the ground to line them up on a tank that was moving forward. They manufactured and then tossed live Molotov Cocktails on towed tank hulks’ back decks. This usually didn’t work.

This was, by no means, the toughest drill taught them.

*****

Franco, serving as coach, squatted in a ditch by the side of a dirt road.

Next to him, Inez Trujillo lay panting. A pair of tanks waited around a bend in the road, a few hundred meters away, revving their engines menacingly. She was scared nearly witless.

In her hands, clutched in front of her, she had a twelve pound sticky satchel charge. It, too, was mostly dirt, not explosive. Tanks are too expensive to blow up as training aids.

She reminded herself, The trick is that the tank can’t see mierda. So the hunter waits until it’s within twenty meters. Then, in the three seconds you have between the driver losing sight of where you will be and the tank crushing where you have been, you leap into the middle of the road and lie down right in front of the monster. Timing things carefully, you pull the igniter, stick the bomb to the underside or suspension of the tank, let it finish rolling over you, then, covered by the dust cloud, roll back to the ditch before the following tank can see you. 

Then: BOOM!

Franco made a call on a small radio he carried. The menacing mechanical roar around the bend picked up and was joined by the squeaking of treads, worse than an infinity of nails on an infinity of blackboards. Inez spotted the long barrel of a tank pushing past the trees. Her tremors grew worse, exacerbated by the shaking of the ground from the metal monster’s roll. She saw the barrel swing over towards her, roughly parallel to the road. There was still more squeaking as the tank pivot-steered at the bend. And then the barrel – all she could really see – was moving in her direction.

As the tanks neared, the little pebbles by her dirt-pressed face began to jump up and down. That vibration grew steadily worse. Then the muzzle of the tank’s cannon was about twenty meters from her position. Inez braced herself for her leap.

Franco slapped her ass and shouted, “Go!”

Inez made a nimble, quick jump onto the road, then flopped to her belly and rolled. The roll was uneven, deliberately so, to get her in line with it and with the tank’s movement. She ended up on her back, precisely as she should have. Frantically, she tore away the tape that covered the sticky part of the satchel charge. By the time she had that off, the tank’s treads had enveloped her, grinding the dirt to both sides. She pulled the ring of the igniter and was rewarded with a crack more felt than heard, followed by a small puff of smoke. Shaking, she slammed the charge, sticky side first, against the hull. Then the tank was past her and, gasping for breath, she made another leap for the ditch, hitting and rolling into its warm embrace. A few seconds later she heard the muffled boom that said her charge had gone off.

Franco patted her shoulder. Leaning down next to her ear he shouted, “Good job, girl!”

Exhaling, Inez thought, Damn; that was fun.

Standing atop the tank, Garcia had seen everything but what had gone on underneath it. He thought, Fine, character-building exercise this is. Though as a combat technique it strikes me as barely better than nothing.

*****

Gloria couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t get out into the road. Once, even, Garcia had to rip the sticky bomb – it did have half a pound of trinitrotoluene in it – from her hands and toss it away, hunching one shoulder against the blast as he fell back to earth.

Few noticed that Garcia threw his own body over Gloria’s before the explosive went off. Then he hauled her to her feet and slapped her to the ground with a curse.

Long after the rest of the women had passed the test, Garcia was still working with Gloria. Exasperated, he finally ended up having her lie right down in the road, with him standing on her back, while the tank rolled upon them. At the last second he would jump aside.

She still wouldn’t, or couldn’t, ignite the bomb and stick it to the tank.

Time ran out before Garcia gave up.

*****

The best part was when the instructors let the women ride the tanks on the inside. That Centurion-Instructor had told the truth, they saw: Tankers were blind compared to infantry. Sure, the latest ones might have been able to see right through fifteen feet of sand to spot a hot tank engine. They couldn’t see a cool foot soldier behind a tree or a wall, or in a trench. The women learned; the women saw. And when they had to use those little vision blocks? Once a foot soldier got within fifty or sixty feet of a tank, or it got that close to them, the tank couldn’t see them. It was as if the tank were like a man, a quadriplegic, whose head and eyes are locked straight to the front and on the level.

And they learned that even if a tank could see them it couldn’t depress the main gun or the coaxial machine gun.

An instructor said, however, “Don’t get too cute, girls, because it can still run you over in the open, and the muzzle blast from the main gun can kill or maim, knock the hell out of you, anyway. But even a small hole in firm soil – the smaller the better, actually – can protect you from that somewhat.”

*****

The roar of the tank engines grew noticeably louder. “Marta,” Maria shouted, “Marta, come on. Get ready! The tanks are coming.”

Marta looked blankly for a moment, then asked, “Tanks?”

“Tanks,” Maria shouted again, then slapped Marta’s face.

That got through to her. Her face came alive. She reached for her rocket launcher and started to stick her head up to fire.

“No! Wait! Let them pass. You can take ‘em from the rear.”

Marta nodded her understanding, whispering, “That would be nice for a change.”

Both women crouched down in their hole with the roar of the tanks’ engines and the squeal of the treads drawing ominously nearer. The tanks began firing their machine guns – at the ground between the positions, but also right over their heads. Some girls later swore they had heard bullets strike the berm in front of their hole! They were right.

One hundred and twenty-five millimeter shells from the tanks’ main guns buried themselves in the dirt between positions before exploding with gut crunching force. The sound grew so loud the girls could barely stand it. It wasn’t as loud as the artillery had been, but it was somehow much more personal.

Then the hole became very dark. “God, the damned thing’s right on top of us!” Maria gripped Marta to give her a little comfort, and perhaps to take some, too. “You would never have gotten a kill with a frontal shot! Let it pass,” Maria shouted again. Why not? The tank couldn’t hear her.

But it didn’t pass, not right away.

*****

“We’re right on top of them, Sergeant,” announced the tank’s driver over the intercom.

“Good. Pivot steer! Let’s give ‘em the time of their lives.”

With a chuckle, the driver began twisting the tank back and forth, side to side, grinding Maria’s and Marta’s position in on them.

“Teach them to be a little more careful about camouflage in front of their position, won’t it, Sergeant?”

“Yeah…teach ‘em a few other things too.”

“Sergeant?” the gunner asked.

“Yes, Gunner?”

“If they had been better camouflaged from in front I couldn’t have fired the main gun without maybe killing them.”

“I knew where their positions were, Pablo,” the tank commander said. “We watched as they were building. I wouldn’t have let you hit a hole, or even get too near one. The grinding is punishment for bad camo.”

“Oh…I see.”

*****

Beneath the thrashing treads, dirt and bits of wood filtered down onto Marta and Maria. They coughed in air made suddenly rank with diesel fumes and dust. When a log fractured, it made a crack they could feel in their bones more than hear with their ears.

After another eternity of terror the tank moved on, more dirt flying from behind the treads and splattering down on them.

“Now, Marta! Now,” Maria screamed. Marta hesitated not a moment, she wanted revenge for what they’d just been through.

Marta risked a quick look to their front. (Yes, risked; bullets had been flying overhead.) Maria guessed there hadn’t been any more tanks or supporting infantry, because Marta turned around and fired almost immediately. The boom and flash of the backblast was followed by a shriek of frustration. A miss.

Maria handed over another rocket from their little store of them. Marta twisted it onto the front of her launcher and took aim again. The backblast sent more crud and smoke into their position.

“Give me another one,” Marta demanded. Maria passed over the last rocket. This time Marta was very careful; Maria could see that from the deliberate way she loaded and the deliberate firing stance she took. This gave Maria time to join her, just her head sticking up from the hole. They saw the tank that had just savaged them moving away. It was firing its machine gun off into the distance.

“Easy and careful, sister,” Maria shouted in her ear. Marta nodded, took a deep breath, let some of it out, and fired.

The rocket sped straight and true. It hit the tank right on the back grill. A big column of orange smoke filled the air behind it.

From the command bunker Franco noticed the tank had been hit. He radioed the crew to tell them so…and to tell them how.

The tank slewed to a stop, the hatch flying open. One by one the turret crew emerged. Then they were joined on the back deck by the driver. Marta and Maria, and the tank crew, just stared at each other for a minute, a degree of disbelief on all five faces. One of the tankers – Maria guessed he might have been the TC, the tank’s commander – began to applaud. The rest of the men joined him. Marta blushed scarlet when they shouted out, “Well done, girls! Well done.” The tank commander threw them a ragged and friendly salute. Then, with a wave, the men reboarded their tank, cranked the engine, and drove off.

Just about then the Centurion’s whistle blew. Marta and Maria ran to where the platoon was assembling. Before they fell in on Garcia they heard a sound – again, barely – that made them look behind. Inez Trujillo was sitting on Gloria, slapping her repeatedly, back and forth, across the face, while Cat looked on with disapproval on her face. It was sort of funny; this little thing beating on someone more than a head taller. None of the cadre interfered in the slightest.

Heart doesn’t come easy.

*****

That night Marta approached the girl who had saved her life. “Maria, I’m sorry for what I said to you. And…I’m sorry for collapsing like that.”

“It’s okay, Marta. Everyone has their...little moments. And your vocabulary was certainly…ah…. enlightening.”

Marta said nothing for a while, just kept staring down at the ground.

“I learned the vocabulary in the biggest and best whorehouse in the capital of La Plata,” she said, eventually. Then it all came out in a rush. How she’d gotten pregnant at fourteen, been thrown out of the house, met a pimp. Done everything.

“I lost the baby, the ability to have a baby, when a customer beat me up, but by then it was too late to do anything else. I was...contaminated. Maria, I learned to hate myself even more than I hated my customers.

“I learned to loath every part of me. Drugs? Oh, yes. Huánuco, mostly. Some marijuana and hashish. Opium. A lot of alcohol. When I was twenty I tried to figure out how many people had had a piece of me. It was over seven thousand. I wondered what could be left of me, with so many having taken a little away each.

“Then a recruiter came from the classis. He wasn’t looking for sailors, not where I worked, but for sea whores to service the fleet off the coast of Uhuru, during the anti-pirate campaign the Yamatans paid for. I went with another girl, my special lover, Jaquelina.

Seeing the confused look on Maria’s face, Marta added, “Yeah, I can go both ways. But I wasn’t in love with Jaquelina because she was a girl but because of the person she was. We both signed up because we figured we could get away from the pimps; make a bundle; and maybe we could start over fresh somewhere.

“Anyway, they needed some girls who were really obviously girls to be bait on a small boat. Jaquelina and I signed up, mostly for the bonus they offered.

“We ended up fighting, because our boat took a bad hit. We got a couple of medals…”

“You’ve got a medal?” Maria asked. Marta just nodded.

“Anyway, eventually my lover was killed.” The woman’s voice broke for a moment. She swallowed to get control of it. “I tried to stick it out with the classis, but the memories were just too bad. So, when this came up, I volunteered for it to get away from those memories.

“If I’m killed here it won’t be so bad. Nobody will miss me. But I can’t fail. Thank you, for helping me not fail.”

Marta started to cry again. Maria began to gather her into her arms, saying, “Marta, I would miss you. I’m going to hug you now. If you yell at me or push me away, I will punch you in the face and then hug you. Understand?”

Marta stiffened at first at being pulled into Maria’s shoulder. Then she relaxed, softening into the other, while continuing to cry.

*****

What the women needed wasn’t just individual heart; they needed something called esprit de corps. Men get it; develop it easily, in fact. After all, the boy gang is one of only two spontaneously occurring human organizations.

And that was one area where the Gorgidas cadre couldn’t help much. They knew how to build it in a male unit, straight or otherwise. It’s pretty easy for them. Take any average group of males (well, Franco had once told them not any group; in much of the world men usually couldn’t develop real esprit de corps; most of them were not capable of even conceiving of loyalty to someone or something who isn’t a blood relation or a body of blood relations); put them in positions of fair equality, give them competent leadership; add stress, misery, danger and excitement to taste: voila – esprit de corps. Having them compete against other groups of men helped quite a bit, too.

*****

“The big advantage,” Franco had said, in one of his frequent, informal lectures, “that men have is that they’re much more emotional, far less coldly rational, than women are.

“Women don't really like to compete at, so to speak, manly things. What does conquest mean to them? What does being better at something than someone else mean, if it isn’t innately womanly? How does it make any of you more of a woman that you can march, shoot, destroy? Not your job, so to speak.

“And it isn’t,” he continued, “that women are incapable of loyalty to something besides themselves. They are loyal: To children, almost always, husbands, usually, parents, generally, societies and nations…that’s slightly less common but by no means unheard of.

“Most modern feminist literature tends to ignore the whole question. Instead, feminists – like Sylvia Torres, for example – want to concentrate only on individual achievements, abilities, and strengths. Which is why those views are useless…to you. Note they never seriously talk about women’s weaknesses. It’s as if they can’t even conceive of the difference between battle and peacetime pursuits. Perhaps they really can’t understand that battle is a social event, conducted by groups, and in which the cohesion of groups matters much more than individual prowess.

“Worse, it’s as if they – like many of the men in the world – can’t even conceive of the benefits and need of that peculiar form of semi-insane groupthink: Esprit de corps.”

*****

Not all lectures were informal.

The women sang with feeling, “Miseria, Miseria…” as they filed into the dank and musty shed. Under its shade, buttocks pressed down uncomfortably into the rough wood chips intended to cushion the fall of the women as they learned to fight hand to hand.

Franco spoke. “You girls know a little more now about battle than you did once. Let me tell you some more.

“A man is not braver than a woman is; ‘She who faces death by torture for each life beneath her breast.’ The Catholic Church has lists of female martyrs miles long.”

He made a hand signal and a picture of a young girl, hanging, neck broken, frozen with shirt ripped off and breasts disfigured ,shone from one wall.

“Rather more recently, there was this girl. We don’t know her name. We do know she was hanged by the Sachsens during the Great Global War for sabotage. She was captured, tortured, and then hanged because she wouldn’t give any up information. That was bravery equal to any man’s.

“Tsk-tsk.

“But, unfortunately, she proves not a damned thing about women’s bravery in battle; in groups.

“None of you have been to war,” Franco observed. “I have. Twice, actually, against both the Sumeris and the Pashtians. So trust me in this. Imagine a battle between a group of women and a group of men. Remember this is not a drill. Bullets are flying; shells scattering razor sharp shards of steel in all directions. People are screaming; some in anger, more in pain.

“There are a few individuals – men and women both, transcendentally motivated – who ignore all that, fight on despite danger. There are also some who cower and hide; and you can’t really blame them, though you just might have to shoot them later. For the rest, though – the relative sheep, like most people – they only stay the course because they care about their comrades, and their comrades’ good opinions, more than they care about themselves.”

Franco turned and pointed to Gloria. “Chica, when was the last time you cared if somebody thought you were brave…or tough….or disciplined? Do not answer. Just think about it. Women are far less likely to care about someone’s opinion of them when that opinion does not concern something that is essentially womanly.”

He concluded, “More than lack of physical strength, more than health, far, far more than courage; it is this that is your greatest obstacle.”

*****

To give the cadre credit, they did try to find the key. And they did run off any girls who seemed incapable of eventually making their unit their primary source of self-identification. They also, naturally, dumped those whose lack of competence could degrade the unit, thereby making it considerably more likely that the rest of the women would develop esprit. They let stay none of the slackers, nor that one thief, nor those who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to shoot...nor those who were too afraid.

Once, the Cadre even let the girls see a male infantry training maniple at close range, just for a few hours. They wanted them to see how things were supposed to be.

That was very strange to the women. The men were jocular, content with themselves and with each other. And they exuded a sense of mass brotherhood the girls had never seen or felt before. They knew, in a way that the women didn’t yet, that any man in that maniple could count on any other to fight by his side, and never to desert him.

*****

The cadre tried all sorts of things, some quite bizarre, to help the women learn the way things were supposed to be. Once, for example, they showed a movie, entitled Kirti, dubbed into Spanish, about a tercio of Hindu soldiers in the Federated States Army during their Formation War.

The girls – most of them – thought it was a pretty good movie, actually, though very sad at the end. A number cried when all the great characters they’d learned to like as the movie progressed were killed in a hopeless, desperate attack, an attack they’d volunteered to make. The story, they were told, was mostly true.

That evening, after chow, they had discussed it with Franco.

He said, “It was, in fact, the battle actions of this mostly Hindu regiment that had led directly to massive opening up of military service to Hindus, which had gone a long way towards winning the war for the side that did so. Of course, the world being the way it is, the Hindus remained in their own units for nearly a century after that.”

Inez commented, “Seems kind of unfair, Centurion….keeping them apart like that. Bound to lead to worse treatment. The movie showed us that.”

“Yes, Private, so it seems. Would the world have been a better place, would even those Hindus have been better off, if they’d been integrated with whites from the beginning, but had failed in battle because they didn’t like or trust one another? Would a statement in favor of racial integration have been worth maybe losing that war?”

He answered his own questions. “I suppose that depends on whether an aesthetic principle is more important than the success of an ultimate good.”


*Interlude*


Gloria Santiago sat miserable and alone on the front steps to the barracks. Other soldiers passed without speaking. The last of her “friends” had been downchecked by the rest of the platoon on a peer evaluation the day before. That woman was already on her way to a non-combat training unit.

Gloria’s eyes were bloodshot, her body sore and bruised. Her once fair skin was dry and scratched. Worst of all, her spirit was very nearly broken.

I just don’t understand it, Santiago thought. This world is so different, so strange. And I’m no good at any of it. Even those damned little bitches Trujillo and Fuentes can beat me up. It’s so unfair...nothing ever prepared me for this.

Santiago stood up and began walking away from the barracks to the nearby woods. She wanted to be alone in fact as well as spirit.

From a hundred meters away Corporal Salazar saw her slinking, spiritless walk. He began to follow her to the woods.

The Amazon Legion (Chapter 4) by Tom Kratman

Navigation Links for The Amazon Legion: 

Prelude & Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6


Chapter Four


The song for the soldier is a war song; it is not “I don't like spiders and snakes.”

--Patricio Carrera


Maria:

By the end of Phase One our strength was down by about twenty percent. It would probably have been a lot lower except that our cadre simply would not let us quit easily at this point and punished us if we tried. We were also a lot stronger, though the strongest of us still couldn’t have taken on the weakest of our instructors in close combat. Even the three or four strongest probably couldn’t have. But it was an improvement. Besides, we could shoot at least as well as an equivalent group of male recruits, and probably better. We could use the weapons that didn’t require any unusual physical strength as well as the men, even a little better in the case of tripod mounted .34 caliber machine guns. Garcia had said something about “natural rhythm” when he’d announced that. We had more trouble with firing the machine guns from their integral bipods or from the hip. And carrying them and a full ammunition load was always a pure bitch.

We still could not march as far as the men, as fast, while carrying the same weight. Actually, as a group we couldn’t even pick up the same weight to start to carry it.

In Phase Two of training they started messing with our heads even more than they had previously messed with our bodies. We can talk about that later.

We also got fresh haircuts. Yes, they buzzed us again. But, then, they issued us two more field uniforms, more underwear, and another pair of the lightweight boots each. Win a few, lose a few.

(We don’t do that anymore, in Amazon training, by the way. After the first buzz cut we don't say a word. But we keep the new girls even filthier than the Gorgidas did with us. As their hair grows, it gets and stays rotten. We leave them the shears, though. When they cut their hair on their own, we know we’re training them hard enough. Discipline is always better when it grows from inside.)

****

One day they marched us into a sort of tree shaded amphitheater surrounded by bleachers they used for a classroom. A pinch-faced, sort of dumpy woman walked to the lectern and introduced herself as Professor Sylvia Torres. She said she was there to teach us about the history of women in the military. She’d obviously never done a day in uniform herself, nor was her degree in history, let alone military history. And the way she wrinkled her nose at our stench didn’t precisely endear her to us.

It was obvious that this woman only partly approved of our experiment. She plainly disapproved of our being segregated. Though it was funny that she entirely believed in, and seemed to approve of, the original Amazons, who were entirely segregated except at breeding season.

“There is plenty of history to support the integration of men and women in the military,” she announced. “To begin, let us take the example of Lucille Brauer, a Federated States Marine who served aboard the FSS Charter during their war of AC 288. She had to keep the fact she was a woman hidden, true. But she did everything the men did, to include fighting in some of the most successful actions in which that ship engaged.”

Franco interrupted to ask, “Professor Torres, how did the Brauer woman manage to keep hidden her sex when it was a regulation of the Federated States Marines at that time for the commander to inspect each of his Marines for their health, buck naked, once a week? I’m just curious, you understand.”

“Professor Franco,” Torres answered, “I’m afraid the record is not specific as to what measures Ms. Brauer had to use.”

“Centurion Franco,” he corrected. “She was successful, though, in hiding her sex, you say. Hmmm. Interesting. Please excuse me for a moment, Professor. Stand up for a moment, Bugatti.”

Marta arose with a suspicious look on her face; her chest prominent, as always.

Franco spoke as if he really were interested in finding a solution to a problem that could be solved if he could only open his mind enough. Rubbing his face contemplatively, he said, “Maybe if we redesigned the body armor a bit...might be hot...but...yes, we could – possibly – do this. Thank you, Professor. Sit down, Bugatti.”
I joined the others in smirking. Trying to make Marta look like a boy was an obvious exercise in futility.

I don’t think Torres quite understood what Franco had just done to her, because she continued, unfazed, “As another example, we have the case of a Volgan tank crew in the Great Global War. This tank crew, composed of two men and two women, successfully held up the advance of an entire Sachsen army of eleven divisions for three days. This was not the Red Tsar’s propaganda, by the way, but came from Sachsen records. After the Sachsens finally succeeded in knocking that tank out, they found that the only survivor of the crew was a woman.” She smiled triumphantly.

Franco raised his hand again. “What were the relationships among those men and women, Professor?”

“They were married, Prof...ah, Centurion Franco.” She consulted her notes, briefly, then said, “They were, in fact, the Political Commissar of the unit, his assistant, and their wives.”

“Ah, then,” Franco said. “So they were married, like us in the Tercio Gorgidas. And the political cell of their unit, you say? That’s very interesting, too. Were they fanatics, do you suppose, Professor?”

“Well,” she answered, “their actions in battle would seem to indicate an unusual degree of commitment.”
“So they didn’t have any of the typical problems you get when you put men and women together. I see.”

Torres did not see, it seemed. “Problems?”

“Oh, you know. Problem Number One: ‘Won’t one of you big strong men help poor little ol’ me?’ Problem Number Two: ‘Private, how grateful would you be if you didn’t have to pull guard tonight.’ Problem Number Three: ‘You’re what! What will my wife say?’ That kind of problem. Tell me, Professor, what kind of tank was it?”

Again she turned to her notes. “It was a very advanced for the time heavy tank, I understand.”

“Ah. So women can crew a heavy tank. Very good. Do you happen to recall how heavy a tank it was?” She didn’t.

“Hmmm. I don’t know either,” Franco said. “I wonder, though, whether there might not be a problem with putting women on tanks today. Even heavy tanks in those days were much lighter affairs than tanks now. Shells were lighter. Tracks were lighter. Parts and engines were lighter. Today, I don’t know that any two women and two men living could adequately fight and maintain a main battle tank which is, at forty to seventy tons, two or three times heavier than its Great Global War counterpart. The tracks are too heavy, the shells are too heavy, everything is too heavy.”

She asked, “But don’t we have tanks that are lighter than that?”

“Well...sort of,” Franco admitted. “The Legions do have Ocelots. They’re pretty light; about nineteen tons. On the other hand, an Ocelot wouldn’t stand a chance against a real tank though it does give pretty good service as an infantry support vehicle. I’m sure women – or men and women mixed – could handle those without any technical problems whatsoever,” Franco concluded enthusiastically.

I guess Torres hadn’t ever given any thought to the technical differences between one type of weapon and another. I didn’t know myself. She seemed happy with Franco’s seeming agreement.

Moving on, Torres said, “Nor is the history of men and women being integrated in combat limited to heavy, high technology, weapons like tanks. Women of Zion, during their wars, gave good service themselves as infantry against the Arabs, mixed in units with men.”

Franco inquired, “How did that work? Were there any problems?”

“Well, there were a few,” Torres conceded. “It was discovered that men simply would not treat women like they would other men. When the women got into trouble there was an unfortunate tendency for the men to abandon the mission to save the women. I wouldn’t blame those boys too much. They couldn’t help it, even if it wasn’t hard wired in their genes, there was some strong cultural conditioning. Besides, it isn’t like straight young men have any brains.” We, even Franco, joined her in a laugh.

“Unfortunately, the women were soon –after about three weeks – removed from units with men and formed into their own, where they continued to do respectably well. This was still patently unfair. It wasn’t their fault that the men acted like that. Worse, today Zion’s women are not even allowed to drive trucks, because trucks go to the front and women are not allowed at the front.”

“I thought that Zion does still conscript young women,” Franco commiserated.

“They do,” she said, “but only if they haven’t gotten married. The drafted women make a pun of the initials for their service; apparently in Hebrew the letters can also stand for ‘We should have gotten married!’”

Franco asked, “Do you suppose that the Zionis do it this way at least partly to make sure that old maids of eighteen or nineteen have all the opportunity possible to meet a great many eligible young men so they’ll get married soon thereafter...to start working on the next generation of – male – cannon fodder?”

“I’m sure I don’t understand the workings of that kind of mind, Pro...Centurion Franco.”

I saw Franco shrug as if he didn’t understand it, either. “Well, it’s just a hunch, of course. But, if not, why not conscript young married women who are not pregnant? It surely doesn’t seem fair to me either. Do they have any other reasons?”

“Maybe one. It is believed,” Torres said, “that there are some cultures – and Arabic culture in particular – in which it would be an unpardonable shame for men to surrender to or run from women.”

It occurred to me that my own culture wasn’t too far from that.

She admitted, “The Zionis claim that when they put women in combat units, Arab units that otherwise would have given up or run away would stay and fight, driving up everybody’s casualties, if they even suspected there were women opposing them. But that’s old news. In the Federated States’ first war against Sumer, some decades ago, the Sumeri prisoners were glad to be guarded by military policewomen.”

Franco commented, “That’s vastly different from actually surrendering to women, of course. But there must have been some such surrenders since some of the Sumeris were equally glad to surrender to civilian camera crews. I have heard that some large numbers tried to surrender to passing aircraft. Still, I’m not sure that this proves anything... except maybe that beating an army that’s been pounded from the air for six weeks, and was rotten to start with, is not something on which to base a generally applicable theory. Still, it is an improvement, Professor, I agree.”

Torres continued on with a discussion about the apparently remarkable ability of armed forces to change character. That part of her discussion was in the same general vein, or at least had the same philosophical underpinnings: That the sheer raw power of armed forces was such that all they had to do was order their people to become something and they would become that thing. She said, “Armies do it all the time. This one should be able to do the same with you and men as easily.”

The last thing she spoke on at any length was concerning our unmitigated, inalienable right, as women, to get pregnant and have babies any time we wanted, at our sole discretion. She really didn’t like the idea of our being administered mandatory implanted contraceptives. Centurion Franco didn’t say a word about that.

*****

The next morning, however, we had to do another road march, a fifteen mile hump.

Franco stood in front of the platoon and asked, rather blandly, who among us had agreed with the feminist speaker about our right to get pregnant. At first no one admitted it. He, promised us, Scout’s Honor, that there would be no retaliation, no personal punishment, against any who might express their honest view.

At that Gloria said, “I agree. You men have no right to tell us when we can, can’t, should, shouldn’t, or must have a baby.”

“Well, we have one honest woman in the group. Have we no more? Surely we must.” He coaxed us and cajoled us until he had fifteen women, about a quarter of what we had left by then, who would state that they believed that Torres had been right, that men had no right to tell us when we could and couldn’t, or should, or must, have a baby.

Franco agreed with them, said so plainly, even enthusiastically. Then he told them to drop their packs, rifles, load carrying equipment and helmets. He ordered them, very gently, out of the formation. He told them not to worry, they wouldn’t be punished, but just to stand by. At that time a couple of the corporals brought out fifteen or twenty long, thick poles.

Then Garcia came out, grinning broadly. You really had to know him at the time to know just how creepy a thing that was.

“Ladies,” he said, “it seems I’m going to be a daddy. Who would have believed it? Me?” he rhetorically asked of the women Franco had called out of formation. “For, you see, you are all now, for this day only, officially ‘pregnant.’ As such, in deference to your delicate condition, and out of concern for the health of your babies, you cannot be expected to – and I, as a mere man, will not ask you to – engage in any strenuous physical labor.”

The creepy grin changed to a frown. He tapped a finger against his own cheek, as if he had just realized the existence of an insoluble problem. “Still, we do have a range to go to. My, my. And we don’t have any buses or trucks scheduled. Hmmm, pity. So, sorry to say, you will have to walk to the range with the rest of us. But you needn’t worry about how your gear will get to training. Your fellow recruits have volunteered to carry it for you.”

Then he ordered the rest of us to string their gear on the poles, shoulder the poles, and, “Forward march.” We formed in three long columns with the “pregnant” women and the instructors marching in the center, Garcia up front and Franco walking the center and rear.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much that hurt. I was – we all were – already carrying as much as we uncomfortably could. Between the poles and the other girls’ gear we had maybe thirty pounds more than that. It was just too much.

Not that Garcia or Franco seemed to care. Their faces remained impassive as we stumbled along, tears mostly hidden by sweat, for fifteen miles. The poles probably weren’t the worst possible way of carrying that extra gear. But they did cut into our shoulders, scrape our necks, throw us off center so that our backs hurt. It was torture. It was intended to be.

The ‘pregnant’ women, all of them – even Gloria, who surprised me by it – begged to be allowed to carry their packs for themselves. Franco, marching next to our squad, was having none of it. When one of the girls tried to help us with the poles he rapped her knuckles with his centurion’s stick, hard, for her trouble.

“Sorry, chica, you can’t have a miscarriage on my watch. Garcia wouldn’t like it, caring and sensitive soul that he is.”

And even though they carried no loads, the day was still hot. They had to drink from the water the rest of us were carrying for them. They apologized, embarrassingly, sincerely and continuously, until Franco told them to, “Shut up! Stop bitching! You claimed the unlimited right. This is what it means; that someone else has to carry your load. Live with it.”

Gloria walked along miserably between Inez and Marta, myself and Cat. Inez and Marta took turns berating her.

“Oh, my,” said little Inez, straining more than most under the load. “Poor, poor Gloria. She’s so smart, she’s so big and strong and tough. She can figure out anything. Why, she’s even figured out how to have someone else carry her equipment.”

“And she didn’t have to flutter her eyelashes or look cute,” continued Marta. “All she had to do was get herself pregnant. We sure are the superior sex, with Gloria as our leader, showing us the way to the top.”

I confess, their verbal abuse of Gloria was becoming annoying. Cat finally got sick enough of it to tell them to shut up and leave her alone. Inez listened, though Marta still grumbled.

That march would normally have taken maybe six hours. It actually took just under ten. And each one of those was several times worse than any hour of marching with a normal load would have been. We tripped; we slipped; we fell. From the awkward walk, the extra weight, most of our feet were bleeding by the end of the day. I never before quite understood how bad Christ’s march up Golgotha must have been. (Though that wasn’t the worst march we ever did.)

We never even tried the old stand-by of, “Won’t one of you big strong men help poor little ol’ me?” It never worked with our instructors anyway.

When we’d reached the range, Centurion Garcia announced, “From this day forward any member of this platoon who goes on sick call will have her gear carried in this way by the others. To support this, each squad will carry two of these poles to all training sites, and in addition to their other gear.”

Three more recruits resigned that night. Two of them were from those whom Garcia had made “pregnant.” They were allowed to go to one of the non-combat positions for women in their home town tercios. I don’t know if any of them took that option.

We took to calling going on sick call, “getting knocked up.” The poles we called, for reasons both obvious and subtle, “pricks.”

*****

Not everything they told us or did to us was anti-female, or even anti-feminist. I learned a lot about the military history of my sex. Maybe more importantly, I learned to think a lot more about the military history of my sex. Centurion Franco did most of that lecturing.

One thing Franco told us, more or less off the record, I’d like to repeat here. Of course, in training now we do tell the recruits that the Amazons might have existed but couldn’t be proved. It’s better that they not be disillusioned if someone ever really disproves their existence.

But Franco thought it fairly likely they had existed in some form. His reasons were partly technical, partly philosophical. Basically, Franco said, the Amazons, if they had existed, were horse archers at a time when horses could transport men only in clumsy chariots. The early horses were too weak in the back to support a man’s weight. Supporting a woman would have been possible centuries before horses were bred that were strong enough for a man but centuries after horses had been domesticated. This also corresponded, roughly, to the invention or introduction of the composite bow, which was – in legend – the Amazons’ weapon of choice.

Moreover, said Franco, the people who recorded the legends – the ancient Greeks – were simply not horse oriented, the area being a poor place to raise horses. They would be fairly unlikely to even have thought of putting women on horseback unless there was some crumb of fact or fact-based rumor to support it.

Lastly, he said that the legends were quite accurate in principle about what would be required to make female warriors, especially that voluntary giving up of their right breasts, an important part of a woman’s appearance and the symbolic reduction of their ability to nurture.

I’m still not sure if I buy it.

Franco told us, too, of some criticisms of military women that, he thought, were patently unfair. It seems there was an instance, thirty or forty years before the Tercio Amazona was formed, when women in the Federated States Army stationed in one of the hot spots around the planet had deserted their posts in overwhelming numbers because there was a chance that war might break out soon. Worse, much worse, men took off in droves to see to their wives and girlfriends.

“No wonder they did,” said Franco. “They’d never been trained for combat. Why, women at that time, in that army, didn’t even fire weapons in basic training. It’s perfectly understandable that they ran, though the men should have been shot.”

That was, obviously, not going to be a problem for us.

Naturally, at some point in time the question came up of our being raped if captured. Franco had a pretty good one liner for that: “Don’t surrender.” He didn’t let it go at that, though.

“Look,” he said, “young men have been having their bodies violated in battle for uncounted millennia. You tell me. In what way is it worse for you to be raped – in a place that’s reasonably suited for a somewhat similar purpose – than it is for a young man to have a sword, spear or bayonet driven through his belly? How is it worse for you to be raped than it is to be disemboweled by a shell fragment? How many women prefer death to submission to rape? Your own sex has already voted on the question and their answer has been that rape is preferable.”

I thought of lying under Piedras and tried not to weep. It hurt more that it had been true.

*****

Don't get the wrong idea; we didn’t have these short lectures in any neat, antiseptic classrooms. There weren’t any outside of the camp. Mostly they weren’t even formal lectures, but just little bits of food for thought Franco would throw to us from time to time. Usually, they tended to come just before or just after we had to do something really miserable, painful, or dangerous.

Once, for example, near the end of basic, we did a thirty mile road march with full combat equipment and supplies in twelve hours. It was part of our graduation exercise. We knew that the equivalent march for the men was forty miles in fifteen hours, longer and a little faster. A lot of our training was like that: something less than the men had to do.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Did this “gender-norming” (that’s what they called it) mean we were inferior to men, that we could never be equal?

That depends, in large part, on what you think the purposes of physical training are in an army. Sure, some of it is building strength, stamina, and endurance. But that isn’t its whole purpose, nor even most of it. My sisters who died on Cerro Mina, and – later on – in other places, were equal to, better than, most men in every important way, even if they couldn’t march as fast. And that isn’t just regimental pride speaking.

Think about battle; I have. A terrifying thing, no? But what is terrifying about it? The chance of painful death or mutilation. The fear of failing your friends and yourself.

Think about fear; I have. I have known fear unimaginable when I was just a girl. I overcame it, as my sisters did. How? Discipline, dedication, determination, morale, courage... call it, “character.”

And that is what our physical training was mostly about; building those things – character building – through pain. We suffered on marches, we suffered on runs, our hands bled from digging. And all of this we did, essentially, to ourselves because – beyond a certain point, and corporals’ boots or centurions’ sticks notwithstanding – it just isn’t possible to make someone take one more step, dig one more shovel full of dirt, if that person won’t do it on his or her own. (I read later that the ancient Greeks and Romans almost never used slaves to row their warships because free citizens could and would do a lot more work on their own than a slave would under the lash.)

You see, it wasn’t all that important that we couldn’t march as far as men. It was that they had to march farther, faster, than we did to suffer as much; to build as much character.

Franco told us, after that march, “Sure we created different standards for you than men have. You’re easier to hurt. You don’t need as much effort for the same pain.”

That was true enough, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Moral considerations may be three times more important, but they aren’t all-important. There are some objective factors that go into the equation, as well. It’s a balancing act, I suppose. So far as I know, we are the only army, at least in recent times, that has found something like a proper balance where women are concerned.

I’ve since had a chance to read about some other armies and how they tried, and generally failed, with making real soldiers of women. Naturally, the Tercio news letter, Hippolyta, has articles on just that in almost every issue. You should read some of them.

Although, to be honest, Hippolyta can be pretty damned smug when comparing foreign failures with our success. Still, we do have some reason to be a little smug.

Take Secordia, for example. About thirty years before us, they opened up all branches of their military service, and all organizations, to women, including the infantry. A great blow for women’s rights? Not exactly. You see, Secordia had previously unified their armed forces. There was no separate navy, air force and army. So a women supply clerk in what had been the Secordian Navy could easily find herself moved to be a supply clerk in an infantry maniple of the Secordian Highlanders, and some did. No big deal, you think? Try to imagine yourself as a plump, comfortable supply clerk on a plump, comfortable ship. Then put yourself out in a Secordian winter in an unheated leaky tent, or maybe no tent. They had some serious morale problems.

And when they tried to put women right into the infantry? Oh, sister, was that a disaster! The Secordian trainers didn’t gender norm anything for those women. One hundred and one women started infantry training. Ninety-eight failed outright. Of the other three – the ones who had to go through the course twice to pass – only one passed and she – maybe because she was the only woman in her unit – left as soon as her enlistment was up. Frankly, I have a sneaking suspicion that the male Secordian soldiers may have eased up on that one woman who made it to ensure that they wouldn’t be forced to gender norm anything, while discouraging any more women from volunteering. And no, repeat no, women volunteered to become regular enlisted infantry in Secordia after that fiasco for years.

They had a little more apparent success with putting women in artillery and armor. I say “apparent” because the success was more apparent than real. Want to know how many women actually ended up serving guns and tanks in the regular Secordian Armed Forces? Exactly...none. They did fire direction computing for the artillery – a dead end job, by the way, in a really modern army, though it still has some future in ours. In the armored corps they drove light armored cars, not real tanks. They did not do the heavy work. And they were mostly despised by the men because of it.

Despised by the men? Maybe not as individuals. But certainly the professionals down south were disgusted enough by having women thrust upon them without any real thought having been put into the very real problems those professionals knew they would have. Complaints were loud and unceasing. So was more than occasional active sabotage of the women in their military.

That wasn’t a problem for us. Since our men didn’t risk having their worlds turned upside down by women warriors, they could help us rather than trying to ruin us. And, in retrospect, I must say that they really did help us...if only to help ourselves.

Other armies had been more pragmatic; and more successful. The Cochinese, during the war there, had made considerable use of women, even as infantry. Not being subservient to the politically and socially dogmatic and militarily ignorant, the Cochinese had put the women in their own – all female – companies. They’d done pretty well, too, as long as they lasted. They took casualties, naturally, and women willing to fight are fairly rare, hard to replace. Pregnancy was a big problem, too, one we’ve solved partly by stringent social pressures and partly by requiring that women serving and not on maternity leave have implanted contraceptives.

Do I seem unsympathetic? Look, I was a woman serving in a combat organization where there were no men to take up the slack left by a pregnant woman. And I couldn’t.

*****

Garcia was sometimes almost human to us. I don’t mean just to an individual; I mean to us as a group.

We had movies, some nights, when we were out on one of the ranges. No, we never got to see a movie we really wanted to see. As a matter of fact, if they showed us one, it was almost a sure thing that it would be something we really, really didn’t want to see.

One I remember, in particular, began with a horrifying landing on a hostile beach. They didn’t even show us the entire thing; just the first thirty minutes or so. It made me sick; and I wasn’t the only one.

Garcia had the projector shut off about the time that someone began to throw up noisily. I didn’t blame her; the sight of a man carrying his own ripped off arm in one hand while he tried to continue attacking was just too much.

Garcia stood in front. Of us he asked, “What do you suppose it takes; to do something like those men did?”

Marta stood to attention and answered, “Being dropped on a hostile beach with no way back and no choice, Centurion.”

“Bullshit. Sit down, Bugatti.” She sat.

“Women are supposed to be more emotional, less logical and rational, than men. Is it true, Trujillo?”

Inez stood and answered, “Centurion, I don't know how we’ve managed to pull off that little piece of propaganda for so long. It’s a bald-faced lie. Oh, sure, we can get away with showing our emotions more readily than men do, as readily as we feel like, as a matter of fact, without anyone thinking worse of us for it. Proves nothing. Truth is, we can be, and usually are, damned cold-hearted bitches, very logical and very rational.”

I thought that was kind of funny, coming from Inez. If there was anybody in the platoon you could count on not to be a cold-hearted bitch, it was generally her...or Cat.

“‘Very logical, very rational,’” Garcia parroted. “Shouldn’t a soldier be rational, Trujillo? Better yet, you...Fuentes. Shouldn’t you be rational?”

“I...I don’t know, Centurion.”

“Fair enough. A soldier should be rational, some would say. Up to a point, sure. But ‘a rational army would run away.’” He paused, meditatively. “Okay, that’s not quite right. A rational ‘army’ might not run away. An army entirely composed of completely rational soldiers, however, surely would. Go back to that movie. Did it make sense for those men to get off those boats under fire, then stay in the line of battle, with death or mutilation staring them in the face every second, when there was a perfectly rational alternative, namely surrendering as fast as they could; hiding, at least? Maybe refusing to even get on the boats?”

“It must have, Centurion, to them, at the time.”

Gloria added, “Centurion, a few days ago you told us that an army that runs suffers more loss than an army that stands and fights.”

“Yes, Santiago. And it’s true. If an army does run its losses will probably be greater than if it had stood fast. But they’ll be greater among those who were slower in deciding to run, and slower in running. A really rational soldier, in a really rational army, knowing his or her comrades are also more or less rational, knowing they’ll run at some point – and probably sooner rather than later – is left with only one choice, to run first and let the enemy kill the others so he or she will have time to get away.”

Inez stood up again. “But they usually don’t, Centurion. Why not?”

“Men usually don’t,” he corrected, “because being relatively irrational and knowing their comrades are as well, they can afford to wait a little. Almost any man or women might make the decision to run. Normal men will wait longer, irrationally long. Often they’ll stick it out long enough to win over the soldiers of an army that are just that much more rational than they are.”

He sent us to bed then.

*****

How were they going to make us usefully irrational? Garcia and Franco took care of it in three ways. First, they ran out anybody who was notably selfish, or even notably less than selfless. We had twice monthly peer evaluations. The cadre actually took into account our views on each other. If enough of us marked another woman down as deficient, she generally didn’t have long left in the unit. Getting “knocked up” more than once, and then only with really good reason, usually meant a ticket home...out of the tercio, anyway.

The other way was subtle. That it was also fairly vicious goes without saying. It revolved around food.

Sometimes Garcia would issue the food for the next day – maybe one hundred and fifty pounds worth – to four or five of us. He would forbid anyone else to so much as touch the rations, it all belonged to the ones selected. We weren’t allowed to break it down or help carry it. So if the rest of us were going to eat, a few girls had to put themselves through hell, lugging our food...selflessly.

Garcia gave those girls an exemption from the peer evaluations for a while so they could throw the food away, some of it or all of it, if they weren’t willing to carry it.

The other way was meaner still. He would occasionally chop off food for a day or two, then issue double or triple rations to those who had performed well, none to those who had done poorly. He did not make us share. In fact, he told us not to, making the point stick once by withdrawing the rations from a girl he caught sharing.

Well, we shared our food anyway, on the sly, and he smirked behind our backs, I strongly suspect.

The point? When someone who is famished will still, irrationally, share food with you or carry it for you, there is a better reason to believe that same someone won’t run out on you when the bullets start flying.
It was really rather clever, all things considered. Still, we figured out how to deal with it until Garcia made resort to an even nastier variant on the trick.

We were standing in formation one morning (you might be surprised how much time you can spend just standing around, in the military), all of us ready to head for the horizon. We really weren’t looking forward to it, especially as some nasty brand of influenza had been making the rounds of the island and many of us were sick.

Franco called the platoon to attention, then turned around to make the morning report to Garcia. “Centurion, all present or accounted for.”

Garcia ordered, “Post!” Franco marched to a place behind the platoon. ( My eyes were locked dead ahead. It wasn’t until some months later that I discovered where, precisely, it was that a junior marched to when the leader called, “Post.”)

Garcia then ordered the platoon to open ranks. Once we had, he sauntered along each rank, never saying a word but looking at each of us intently. Sometimes, as with me, he’d feel a forehead for temperature. After he had finished with the last rank he ordered us to close up again.

“Ladies,” he began. He usually called us “twats,” or “cunts,” or “bitches.” I had a feeling that “ladies” was going to turn out a lot worse. “Ladies, I have here six cases of rations. This is, as I’m sure you’re aware, your entire ration for the next two days.” He stopped, somewhat melodramatically. “Privates Nuñez, Galindo, and Miranda, you are to carry two cases each...unless some other should volunteer to carry those two cases in your stead. Without any help from anyone else.”

He had named the three weakest and sickest among us, the bastard.

“Fall in prepared to march in five minutes. Fall out.”

We fell into a sort of gaggle. Isabel Galindo said, weakly, “I’ll carry my own. Take care of Lara and Edi.” Little Trujillo looked Galindo up and down carefully, then nodded and said, “I’ll carry Edi’s. Who’ll take care of Lara’s?”

Marta spoke just before Cat did. “I will.”

Cat said, “Dear, I’m in better shape than you. Let me.”

“Maybe so, Catarina. But I’m still stronger. It’s mine.”

I think my faith that these were women I could count on in a pinch went up a notch right about then.

*****

We discovered some other interesting things about ourselves, too. There’s an old saying: Women have no friends, only rivals. It ranks, for truthfulness, right up there with an equivalent man’s saying: Never introduce your girlfriend and your best friend. Truth, but maybe not the whole and universal truth.

Because there on the island, with no men to compete over, we did develop into real friends, some of us.

Have you never noticed how women of merely moderate attractiveness will often gravitate around the leadership of the really beautiful ones? (Maybe that’s not true in every country, but it’s true enough in mine.) And the beautiful ones will be glad to have the merely pretty ones around, because it makes them look even more beautiful by comparison. You might wonder what’s in it for the merely pretty. Simplicity itself: They get a little glamour and if they want they can have the cast-offs. I wonder if men will ever realize that the human race is just one big experiment in selective breeding run, since inception, entirely by us.

We didn’t work that way, though. Who’s beautiful when her head is shaved, she’s covered with mud, wearing rags, and stinks? Who’s beautiful without men to admire her? Nobody. So who takes charge? Those who have an ability that’s based on more than looks.

Not everybody got the message right away. I only did, myself, after getting some help from a friend.

*****

“Centurion. Private Fuentes, Maria; reporting as ordered.”

“At ease private.” Garcia stood in front of me and looked me up and down, carefully, like a surgeon inspecting a diseased organ. Then, without any warning at all he slapped me, right across the face, hard enough to knock me to the floor.

“On your feet. At ease....Why do you suppose I did that, Fuentes?”

Though I’d managed to get to my feet, and automatically back to attention, I was literally speechless. I didn’t answer.

“I asked a question, Private.”

I started to blubber, “I don’t know, Centurion.”

“All right...maybe you really are dense. Your file says no but...you could be. I’ll help you. What did I just do?”
“You hit me.” For no reason, you bastard. Piedras, at least, had reasons.

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Does it still hurt?”

I had to answer, “No, it doesn’t...not as much anyway.”

“Good...good. Now think back a bit. This morning, Santiago dumped a handful of sand and rocks down your drawers. Almost everybody laughed at you. I saw it. Did that hurt then?”

“A little...Centurion.”

“Does it still hurt?”

“Yes...Centurion.”

“What hurts more; your face from my slapping you, or your insides from Santiago’s being shitty to you?”
I took too long about my answer, he knocked me down again, then picked me up, one handed, and set me on my feet.

“Do you recall when...what was that cunt’s name...oh, yes, Ramirez. Do you recall when Ramirez made fun of you for being such a midget?”

I remembered...too well. Again, almost the whole platoon had laughed at me. That still hurt.

He let me stand for a bit, then asked, “What hurts you more now?”

He was raising a hand already when I blurted out the answer, “That does! Ramirez and Santiago.”

“Very good, Fuentes. You can make value judgments.”

Then he grew quiet, contemplative for a while. “What I’m trying to show you, Fuentes...to drive into your little recruit pea brain...is that physical pain goes away fairly quickly. It isn’t always something to be avoided. But pains of the heart? They last and last. I want you to leave now and think about this: If you cannot stand up for yourself, you do not have what it takes to stand up for your regiment or your country. Dismissed.”

I thought, still think, that I was about to be booted. I left there feeling absolutely miserable. It wasn’t enough, it seemed, just to follow orders. I wasn’t good enough. I was going to be washed out. Too weak. Too accommodating. Too... cowardly. No good. Worthless. A poor woman and a poor mother. A failure...failure...failure.

I can’t even find the words to tell you how much that hurt.

*****

There are six leadership positions for the recruits in a training platoon, recruit platoon leader, recruit platoon optio, and four squad leaders. The cadre rotated them every few days to a week, or – more typically – until you screwed up badly enough to be relieved.

Gloria was the seventh or eighth one to fill the platoon leader’s slot in my platoon. When Centurion Garcia announced her name I would almost swear she had an orgasm. Power does that to some women; some men, too, I understand.
 
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Gloria, though. I was getting ready to pack my bags, emotionally if not in fact. I was sitting on Marta’s bunk, the lower one, contemplating my misery while looking at a picture of the child I was failing.

“Fuentes, go clean the latrine,” she said to me one day after we had been allowed to move back to the Quonset huts.

I didn’t answer her, just kept staring at my one picture of Alma.

“Fuentes, you nasty little puke, go clean the latrine.”

I’d had that duty the day before. Curiously, none of Gloria’s favorites had pulled anything nasty since she’d taken over. Without thinking, I said, “Stuff it up your ass, bitch.”

Now if Marta had told me, or Inez Trujillo, I’d have done it, even in the mental state I was in. For one thing, neither of them – nor probably any of the other girls – would have spared her special friends.

She walked up to me as if she wanted to paste me. I ignored her. But then she pulled my picture of Alma from my hands, tearing it.

I tell you, I saw red. It must have shown on my face because Gloria started to back up. She never got far enough away. I sprang to my feet and punched her first, right in the solar plexus. Good training tells. She went ass-down to the floor, gasping like a beached fish. But I didn’t stop. I kicked her with booted feet five or six more times. As she fell back completely onto the floor and tried to twist away, I kicked her in the kidneys, just as I’d been trained. She didn’t have enough air in her lungs to scream, though her face contorted as if she were trying. Another kick rolled her onto her belly. Then I jumped on her back.

Marta and Inez pulled me off of her after about the fifth time I smashed her face onto the concrete floor.

When Garcia came in he took one look, gave Gloria and myself both three days bread and water, then relieved her and appointed me the next platoon leader.

I cannot tell you precisely why, not even now, but I felt good. I mean really, really good after that. It felt so great that I laughed for long enough that the others began to look at me strangely.

I lasted as platoon leader for five days, which was about average. I might have done better if I hadn’t been so damned hungry.

*****

We marched or ran pretty much everywhere we went. The only time we rode trucks or buses was when there wasn’t time to walk. You may think that was hard on us. Sometimes it was.

Other times, though, times when we didn’t have to carry anyone else’s gear, or had time enough that the pace was more like a regular walk, it was positively enjoyable. We sang: “...If I can’t get a man then I’ll surely get a parrot, and it’s oh, dear me, how would it be, if I died an old maid...” Or maybe “John Henry” or “Todo por la Patria”. Sometimes more warlike songs, too: “...In the streets of the City, the enemy’s falling, and trixies are crying out, ‘arriba Patria’.” We had a bunch of really dirty songs, too, but I won’t repeat them.

Another song we were very fond of was an old, old one. I understand it came here from Old Earth and somehow managed to survive and stay in currency over the centuries, maybe with some changes here and there. It was “Apoyate,” to the extent that these songs even have titles. Sometimes, when our tails were really dragging on a long run, Marta, Cristina or one of the other, stronger, girls would jump out of the formation and begin to sing, “Call for the tercio, we’ll give you a hand...”

It can really pick you up, when you hear a couple of hundred other human voices crying out, “Apoyate, when you’re not stro-ong, mi hermanita, I’ll help you carry on...”

It makes you wonder, sometimes, about how much of physical strength is really mental attitude. Anyway, that was a private song. We never sang it where men, outside of our instructors, could hear us. It was only for each girl to strengthen every other...because we never knew just when anyone of us might need a little help.

Still, for me, my greatest help was the thought of a little girl back in the city who needed me to succeed.

*****

The singing was fun. But if you didn’t want to join in, usually nobody made you. You could be together on a march, but you could also be alone if you wanted, even in the company of a couple of hundred sisters. And the cadre generally didn’t harass us on the march, so long as we kept up. I think – no, I know – that that was so we would learn to like to march.

And, once your feet, shoulders and back toughened up, there was so much to see and hear on a march.

Once, about halfway through a twenty kilometer hump, I heard a sort of...buzzing from the ranks in front of me. I didn’t know what it was until I turned a curve and saw it: A waterfall landing in a grove so green I may never see its like again, the water laughing as it splashed on the rocks at its base. A pair of green, gray, and red trixies – gorgeous things – sat on a rock next to the pool, preening themselves.

You know, it’s easier to love your country when your country really is beautiful.

One time, I remember too, we marched past a group of young men who were probably about halfway through their own training cycle. Hairless, smelly, and dirty as we were, they still watched us march by with the expressions of a group of starving tigers, looking in a butcher shop window.

Out of pure meanness we sang the sexiest, filthiest, song we knew. It had some really great sound effects, notably that of several hundred women faking an orgasm...in cadence: “Uhh… Uhh…. Oh... Ah... Uhh… Uhh… Oh... Ah!”


*Interlude*


The meeting was in one of the larger conferences rooms at headquarters, on the Isla Real, near the airfield. The trainers from the Tercio Gorgidas had come in two buses, which remained parked outside the white stone building that had once been headquarters for the entire Legion. There was also a lot of what had been senior officer housing there, too, in the same general area. Most of that was filled by tribunes and sergeants major, now, what with most of the senior positions having moved to the mainland.

On the parade field the headquarters and housing surrounded, a lone Cricket light airplane waited with the engine running on idle. That was Carrera’s.

Carrera said, “So give me the truth; how are the women doing?”

The cadre from the Tercio Gorgidas sat quietly at first. They were loath to admit to Carrera, their Dux Bellorum, that they had problems.

Seeing their reticence, Carrera changed his inquiry. “Fine. Tell me what’s going well.”

Centurion del Valle answered first. “They’ve become good shots.”

“How good?”

“About twelve percent better than an equivalent group of men,” del Valle said. “But that didn’t come free. It took a lot more time and ammunition to get them there...a lot more. Even more than that for the machine guns.

“So? That would be true for men, too, if we’d spent the time and ammo,” del Valle finished.

Carrera frowned. “Can they handle the machine guns, Centurion?”

“Sure...on the tripods,” del Valle answered. “Firing from the bipods or hip shooting?” He put out a hand and wriggled his fingers. “So, so...at best. And when we load ‘em down with a full combat load; guns, tripods, spare barrel and ammunition? It takes three of them to carry what two of us can. And those three have a tougher time of it.”

Carrera wrote something in a note book. “What about if we changed their weapons from 6.5 millimeter to something smaller, say 5.5? We could buy them special weapons that would be lighter, couldn’t we?” Carrera didn’t wait for an answer. “No...I suppose not. Then they’d be the only ones with those calibers. Make resupply kind of tough. All right; what’s the real problem?”

Franco stood to answer. “Sir...sir, we hate this shit! And we don’t know what we’re doing, not really. So we’re gay? We don’t hate women, any of us. We had mothers, sisters...women we’ve loved. And we are sick to death of being so damned...rotten to these girls.”

Carrera answered, “Tough.” Franco shrugged. Garcia reached up a hand to pull him back to his seat, then stood himself.

“Sir, what my partner just said? It’s true enough. We’ll all be happy when there are enough trained women that we can turn it all over to them. But what’s really getting us is that we’re failing. What works for men just isn’t working right for them. They’ve formed little cliques and friendships, yes. But they’ve got no esprit, no sense of being part of an important community that’s greater than any individual. They’re just little groups and pairs of friends. Oh sure, they look from the outside like they’re bonding the way soldiers should. They sing well together, for what that’s worth. But they don't seem to feel like a maniple of men would towards each other. Or if they do, we can’t tell.”

“Could they fight?”

“No, sir. Not yet. Maybe never.”

“Crank up their training.”