Unrecoverable

A Short Story

By the time I hit my last cruise and asked for re-up, I’d been fitted for my seventh arm. That wasn’t even a unit record, either. Most of us had been almost rebuild from spares, like that Greek guy’s ship. Every major organ system and a bunch of my bones had needed some help at some point. You don’t jump into the places we go without some bumps and bruises.

The problems with the old system mainly consisted of replacement attrition. The taxpayers dumped millions into every raw recruit. By the time he's barely combat effective, he's getting recycled home to deal with lifelong effects from major wounds, or PTSD so bad that he'll never fully reintegrate into society. Or, he gets sent home in a stainless steel box.

Ultimately, if you look at the resource problem, the vast majority of that taxpayer cash gets flushed down the crapper. You keep trying to recycle your best combat veterans, but they're still only good for three to four deployments before either their body or their mind decides that they're done. The wasteful cycle: train until barely effective, work up until deployment, rotate home, and try and figure out what to do with the leftovers.

Well, they figured a way to fix it. Now they never send us home and never let us die.

By the time the lights come on inside the cruiser’s ready bay we are pretty well thawed and juiced, for guys who’ve been medically dead for an unknown period. You never know how long they’ve had you out until the briefings, and even then you usually have to piece it together based on your new location. It’s not considered strictly SOP for noncombat personal to fraternize in any way. They drive us and brief us and jump us, tend us when we come back shredded and babysit us while we’re out. But we are a breed apart on the cruiser. A society of warriors ever-ready to serve. Psych thinks it’s Very Important that our contacts with the Outside World be minimized, and Psych tends to get what they want. Not that any of us want to talk to anybody else very much.

By the time we get to the briefing room, the drug cocktail has kicked in real good and everyone’s talking pretty nonstop. Sometimes I wonder if I would have re-upped without that sweet hammer mashing my brain flat at the start of each pre-op. If you haven’t woken up from a nap, dropped a horse-killing bump of assorted chemical go before skydiving and running a three day firefight, let’s just say it’s not an easy feeling to reproduce. We’re never awake to feel the come down, so Psych traces the hairy edge of our personalized tolerances.

Briefings don’t last long because there usually isn’t a lot to say we haven’t heard. If they thaw us out we already know that something somewhere has gone badly sideways. We’re the blunt instrument come to stem the tide at the darkest hour. Or at least that’s what I can remember from the recruitment videos. As you check out your gear, rig out and run tests on the high altitude suits, and finalize all the pre-flights, all you can really think about is getting down there and going hot. By the time the door opens, I can barely feel my face and my brain activity feels like a feral toddler screaming for blood.

As soon as you hit dirt, you can feel it. It’s not just the drugs, although they certainly don’t hurt. It’s better than sex (from what I remember), an all-consuming wave of adrenal exultation that keeps coming for as long as they drop you ammo and orders. Every one of us chases this dragon, and as long as we’re in the unit they make sure we’re high for the majority of our waking lives. Pain and fear are for other people, unnecessary for us and so we’ve had them chemically drowned. Your already tiny world further collapses and your fireteam is a universe, each man a gravitationally charged galaxy of emotions, every interaction and reflex unfurling in ecstatically slow motion. Moments flash up on your mind to be engraved permanently one after another. Combat’s surreal hyper-truth, free and unlimited.

A man dragging half a man back into a secure position to administer aid, while the casualty provides covering fire and chuckles gleefully.

Reading the printed warnings on a grenade casing as it arcs slowly away from your outstretched arm.

Looking down and noticing the fluttering remains of your left hand mingled with shreds of uniform, wondering how long it’s been like that.

That’s how deployments usually go. By the time you handle your objectives and start cleaning up they’ve already sent the pickup for you. You’re back on the couch waiting to be iced within a couple hours of firing your last round. No real life to pretend for, no clueless people to ask you a bunch of questions. You go to sleep stabilized from whatever damage you took, and wake up fully functional and ready to go.

But I’m not telling you about this one deployment because it was normal, obviously.

There aren’t tons of warning signs when a guy goes for a walk, like in the movies. He wasn’t muttering to himself or freaking out, at least not more than any of us. Nobody noticed until count off before loading up for the ride back. We asked around, the last guy to see him volunteered his info, we checked his ping. Sure enough, there he was just walking out of the perimeter. Nobody expected anything serious, and I volunteered to run out and bring him back.

When I got out his position, I started to get a bit worried. He was bleeding pretty bad, but then so were the rest of us. I started checking the worst stuff out and slapping speed clot patches on, trying to calm him down a bit. The real weird thing was that he was making noise. Just sitting there, staring out over the edge of our perimeter, breathing little whining groans every few seconds. In all my jumps I’d never heard a man make those noises. I didn’t even have to check his bio reads. I could tell from his eyes that he wasn’t juiced up. After a minute he focused on me, calmed a bit.

“Have you ever wondered what it really felt like, man?”

I tried to shush him gently and kept applying aid.

“I think I want to go back, man. I want to see what it’s like. I want to…”

I knew in a flash what I should do, my brain still racing to make connections, flipping through scenes one eerie freeze frame at a time. It felt like seeing the future and the present at once; if he walked off, a security breach like that would change everything. Nobody was supposed to know what we did, and we weren’t supposed to be back in the world. They would shut us down. Strip the unit for parts. Who knows what would happen to us. We wouldn’t deploy again.

I checked my body cam and for a second the rush of gratitude almost leveled me. If I still believed in anything I would have prayed. Something had hit it, shattered the lens, no red light. It was going to be ok. If I acted quick.

I pressed my secondary weapon to the base of his neck and pulled the trigger until he was all but decapitated.

A pathetic huddle of human remains webbed in shredded tactical rig, the man’s face somehow looking back at me and upside down, serene.

I was already headed back inside the perimeter, pausing briefly to lob a few grenades back towards the body.

“Taxi this is Niner, sustained complete casualty, repeat Four is total KIA, encountered IED and sustained resistance, remains unrecoverable.”

I mag-dumped back over my shoulder with the mike still keyed on.

“Niner this is Taxi, are you sure? Will send TacMed to attempt recover and stabilize.”

“Negative Taxi, do not approach.” Another mag-dump, my last grenades for good measure. I paused for what I hoped was a dramatic beat. “He’s gone.”

A half-second slowly evolving, stretching into an excruciation of suspense. I think I can hear a deep breath through the radio, and my wrist itches where blood is coagulating. I wonder idly in the second half-second whose it is.

“Niner this is Taxi, Four is KIA confirmed. Rendezvous for extraction.”

I felt like didn’t breathe the whole ride, or through medical check-in or Psych evaluation. I finally heaved a sigh as I hit the sleeper couch and felt my body temp dropping, just before they put me under. The frozen images slid back through my mind like old pictures, some I held onto, others I quickly pushed aside.

I cried with relief as I fell asleep. I couldn’t wait to wake up.