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Warriors 1

Tom Doherty Associates

Joe Haldeman

Here's a fascinating look at the high-tech future of warfare — which, in its essentials, and particularly in its costs, turns out to be not all that different from the way that war has always been....

Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the '70s. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story "Tricentennial," won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a "hard-science" writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of "The Hemingway Hoax." His story "None So Blind" won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tool of the Trade, The Coming, the mainstream novel 1968, Camouflage, which won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr., Award, and Old Twentieth. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and nonfiction, War Stories. As editor, he has produced the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, Nebula Award Stories 17, and, with Martin H. Greenberg, Future Weapons of War. His most recent books are two new science fiction novels, The Accidental Time Machine and Marsbound. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

Forever Bound

I'd thought that being a graduate student in physics would keep me from being drafted. But I was sitting safely boxed in my library carrel, reading a journal article, when the screen went blank and then blinked PAPER DOCUMENT INCOMING, which had never happened before — who would bother to track you down at the library? — and I had a premonition that was instantly confirmed.

One sheet of paper slid out with the sigil of the National Service Commission. I turned it right side up and pressed my thumb onto the the thumbprint circle, and the words appeared: "You have been chosen to represent your country as a member of the Ninth Infantry Division, Twelfth Remote Combat Infantry Brigade," Soldierboys. "You will report to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to begin RCIU training at 1200, 3 September 2054."

Just before class registration, how considerate. I wouldn't be pulled out of school. I even had two weeks to pack and say my good-byes.

Various options came to mind as I sat staring at the page. I could run to Sweden or Finland, where I'd also face national service, but it wouldn't have to be military. I could take the Commission itself to court, pleading pacifism, asking to be reassigned to Road Service or Forestry. But I didn't belong to any pacifist groups and couldn't claim any religion.

I could do like Bruce Cramer last year. Stoke up on painkillers and vodka and shoot off a toe. But his draft notice had been for the regular infantry, pretty dangerous.

People who ran soldierboys never got shot at directly — they sat in an underground bunker hundreds of miles from the battlefield and operated remote robots that were invincible and armed to the teeth. Sort of like a sim, but the people you kill actually are people, and they actually do die.

Most soldierboys didn't do that, I knew. There were about twenty thousand of them dispersed throughout Ngumi territory, and most of them just stood guard, huge and impregnable, unkillable, symbols of Alliance might. Which is to say, American might, though about 12 percent came from elsewhere.

My adviser, Blaze Harding, was in her office a couple of buildings away, and said to bring the document over.

She studied the letter for much longer than it would take to read it. "Let me explain to you ... in how many dimensions you are fucked.

"You could run. Finland, Sweden, Formosa. Forget Canada. It's a combat assignment, and you'd be extradited. In any case, you'd lose your grant, and it would be the end of your academic career. Likewise with going to jail.

"If you obey the law and go in, you'll be like Sira Tolliver over in Mac Roman's office. You have to report 'only' ten days a month. But she seems to spend half her time recovering from those ten days."

"Just sitting in a little room?"

"A cage, she calls it. Evidently it's a little more strenuous than sitting.

"The plus side is that the department wouldn't dare drop you. If you just show up for work, your position with the Jupiter Project is as safe as tenure. As long as the grant holds out, which should be approximately forever." The Jupiter Project was building a huge supercollider in orbit around Jupiter, millions of electromagnetic doughnuts circling out by the orbit of Io.

"Once they turn it on," I said, "our worries will be over anyhow. Instantly sucked into a huge black hole."

"No, I favor the 'explode and be scattered to the edge of the universe' theory. I always wanted to travel." We shared a laugh. The Project would simulate conditions 10 seconds after the Big Bang, and the tabloids loved it.

"Well, at least I'll lose a few pounds in basic training. I've been putting on two or three pounds a year since I graduated and left the soccer team."

"Some of us like them a little plump," she said, pinching the skin on my forearm. It was a funny situation. We'd been attracted to each other since the day we met, three years ago, but it had never gone beyond banter. She was fifteen years older than me, and white. Which was not a problem on campus, but outside, Texas is Texas.

"I goo-wikied something you ought to see. Running a soldierboy isn't really just sitting around." She turned her clipboard around so I could read the screen.

"Not really so safe, then."

"And the injuries in the RCI, combat or not, would all be brain injuries. You'd be out of a job here."

"You're just saying that to cheer me up."

"No, but I'm thinking you ought to try switching to the infantry, as crazy as that sounds. With your education and age, they'd put you behind a desk, for sure."

"Well, I've got two weeks to nose around. See how much latitude I'll have. But what about my job here?"

She waved a hand in dismissal. "You can do it in twenty days a month. Actually, I was going to take you off the physics lab babysitting anyhow; just grade papers for 60 and help me with the 299 special projects." She looked at her calendar. "I guess Basic Training will be full-time."

"I don't know. Sounds like it, from what I've heard."

"Find out for me. If I have to kidnap somebody for October and November, I'd better start looking around." She reached across the desk and patted my hand. "It's an inconvenience, Julian, but not a disaster. You'll come out on top."

Blaze hadn't brought up the largest danger and the biggest attraction of being a "mechanic," as the soldiers who operated the soldierboys were called. They all had to be jacked, a hole drilled into the back of the skull and an elecronic interface inserted, so you shared the thoughts and observations, feelings, of the rest of your platoon. There were five men and five women in a platoon, so you become like a mythical beast, with ten brains, twenty arms, and five cocks and five cunts. A lot of people tried to join up for that experience. That was not quite what the army was looking for.

Almost all mechanics were drafted, because the army needed a peculiar mix of attitudes and eptitudes. Empathy is obvious, being able to stay sane with nine other people sharing your deepest feelings and memories. But they also needed people who were comfortable with killing, for the so-called "hunter-killer" platoons. They were the ones who got all the attention, the bonuses, even fan clubs. I could assume I wasn't going to be one of them. I didn't even like to go fishing, because of the blood and guts and hurting the fish.

The installation of the jack was also risky. The rate of failure was classified, but various sources put it between 5 and 15 percent. Most of the failures didn't die, but I wondered how many of them went back to intellectual pursuits.

I found out that Basic Training was indeed full-time, for eight weeks. The first four weeks were intensely physical, old-fashioned boot camp — not obviously useful for people who would spend their military career sitting in a cage, thinking. After four weeks, they installed the jack, and you started training in tandem with your other nine.

I did apply to be reassigned, to infantry or medical or quartermaster. (They crossed that off; you can't join a noncombat arm in time of war.) I was rejected the day I applied.

So I increased my jogging from one mile a day to three, and worked out on the gym machines every other day. Basic training had a bad reputation, and I wanted to be ready for the physical side of it.

I also spent more social time with Blaze than I ever had before. She had no teaching load during the summer. I had legitimate reasons to drop by the Jupiter Project, though I could do most of my work from any computer console anywhere in the world. I tended to show up around lunchtime or when the office nominally closed at five.

You couldn't call it dating, given the difference in our ages, but it wasn't just coworkers having lunch, either. It could have evolved into something if there'd been more than two weeks, perhaps.

But on September 2, she took me to the airport and gave me a tight hug and a kiss that was a little more interesting than a coworker saying "goodbye for now."

When I got off the plane in St. Louis, there was a woman in uniform holding a card with my name and two others on it. She was bigger than me, and white, and looked pretty mean. I stifled the impulse to walk right by her and get a ticket to Finland.

When the other two, a woman and a man, showed up, she walked us to an emergency exit that apparently had been disabled, then down onto the tarmac in the 105-degree heat. We walked a fast quarter mile to where a couple of dozen people stood in ranks, sweating beside a military bus.

"No talking. Get your sorry ass in line." A big black man who didn't need a megaphone. "Put your bags on the cart. You'll get them back in eight weeks."

"My medicine —," a woman said.

"Did I say no talking?" He glared at her. "If you filled out your medical forms correctly, your pills will be waiting for you. If not, you'll just have to die."

A couple of people chuckled. "Shut up. I'm not kidding." He stepped up to the biggest man and spoke quietly, his face inches away. "I'm not kidding. In the next eight weeks, some of you may die. Usually from not following orders."

When the fiftieth person came, he loaded us all into the bus, a wheeled oven. My god, I thought, Fort Leonard Wood must be over a hundred miles away. The windows didn't open.

I sat down next to a pretty white woman. She glanced at me and then looked straight ahead. "Are you going to mechanics' school?"

"Go where they send me," she said with a South Texas drawl, not looking at me. Later that day, I would learn that mechanics train with the regular infantry, "shoes," for the first month, and it's not wise to reveal that you were going to spend all your subsequent career sitting down in the air-conditioning.

We drove only a couple of miles, though, to the military airport adjacent to the civil one, and piled into a flying-wing troop transport, where we were stuffed onto benches without seat belts. It was a fast and bumpy twenty-minute flight, the big sergeant standing in front of us, hanging on to a strap, glaring. "Anybody pukes, he has to clean it up while everybody else waits." Nobody did.

We landed on a seriously bumpy runway and were separated by gender and marched off in two different directions. The men, or "dicks," were led into a hot metal building, where we took off all our clothes and put them in plastic bags marked with our names. If they were going to ferment for eight weeks, the army could keep them.

They said we would get clothes when we needed them, and had us shuffle through a line, where we contributed blood and urine and got two shots in each arm and one in the butt, the old-fashioned way, painful. Then we walked through a welcome shower into a room with piles of towels and clothing, fatigues sorted more or less by size. Then we actually got to sit down while three dour men with robot assistants measured our feet and brought us boots.

There was a rotating holo of a handsome guy showing us what we were supposed to look like — the trouser legs "bloused" into boots, shirt seam perfectly aligned with belt buckle and fly, shirtsleeves neatly rolled to midforearm. His fatigues were new and tailored, though; ours were used and approximate. He wasn't sweating.

I thought I'd second-guessed the army by having my hair cut down to a half-inch burr. They shaved me down to the skin, in retribution.

The sun was low, and it had cooled down to about ninety, so they took us for a little run. That didn't bother me except for being overdressed. We went around a quarter-mile cinder track, in formation. After four laps, the women joined us, and together we did eight more.

Then they piled all of us, hot and dripping, into a freezing mess hall. We waited in a long line for cold greasy fried chicken, cold mashed potatoes, and warm wilted salad.

The woman who sat down across from me watched me strip the sodden fried batter from the chicken. "On a diet?"

"Yeah. No disgusting food."

"I think you goin' to lose a lot of weight." We shook hands across the table. Carolyn from Georgia, a pretty black woman a little younger than me. "What, you graduated and got nailed?"

"Yeah. Ph.D. in physics."

She laughed. "I know where you're goin'."

"You, too?"

"Yeah, but I don't know why. BFA in Creative Viewing."

"So what's your favorite show?"

"Hate 'em all. Unlike most folks, I know why I hate 'em. Now tell me you'd die if you didn't get your Kill Squad fix every week."

"Don't have a cube, or time to watch it. When I was a kid, my parents let me watch only ten hours a week."

"Wow ... would you marry me? Or you got somethin' goin' already."

"I'm gay, except for sheep."

"Ewe." We both laughed a little too hard at that.

Shoe training was about half PT and half learning how to use weapons we'd never see again, as mechanics. Even the shoes would probably never use a bayonet or knife or bare hands — how often would you not have a gun, and face an enemy who didn't have one either?

(I knew the rationale was more subtle, training us to be aggressive. I wasn't sure that was a good idea for mechanics, though — your soldierboy might wipe out a village because you lost your temper.)

Carolyn's last name was Collins, and we were next to each other in the alphabet. We spent a lot of time talking, sometimes sotto voce when we were standing in formation, which got us into trouble a couple of times. ("One of you lovebirds runs around the track while the other finishes painting this wall.")

I was really smitten with her — I mean the kind of brain-chemistry-level addiction that you ought to be able to control by the time you're eighteen. I thought of her all the time, and lived to see her face when we mustered in the mornings. Her expressions and gestures made me think she felt the same way about me, though we carefully wouldn't use the word love.

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Excerpted from Warriors 1 by George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 2010 George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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