Cyberpunk (39 page)

one wants to be the first to admit he’s cold and go fetch more wood.

On the other side we have a whiteboard, one of (shamed am I to

admit this!) Nuttbruster’s truly great ideas. He found six of them surplus

somewhere, and the first I knew about it was when he showed up in my

office one day with a hand-drawn pinout of the comm port. The concept

is your basic wall-sized chalkboard, except you use a magnetic stylus

instead of chalk, and once you have the thing all scribbled up you can—

ZAP! Press a button, and hand out photocopies of the board to

everybody in the class!

ZAP! Press a different button, and fax a bitmap image to any other

whiteboard or graphic terminal on the Academy network!

ZAP! Press a third button, and bitch a lot at Mikey Harris because he

still hasn’t found an Optical Character Recognition program that can

decipher chickentrax instructorscript and turn it into nice, neat, ASCII

text and .PGI graphics. Which, I guess, was Nuttbruster’s whole

argument for getting the whiteboards in the first place: Further pursuit of

the mythical “paperless office.” (And after that, the paperless latrine?)

Come to think of it, after six months of being bitched at, I’m not too

crazy about the whiteboards, either.

The Colonel reaches the end of a lap, pivots, and comes to a stop.

“Question!” he barks out, looking up. (
Question!
the guy sitting next to

me dutifully writes on his notepad.) “What is the legitimate mission of

the military in peacetime?”

Six guys start to raise their hands, then stop and slow, awkward, try

to pretend they’re actually scratching their noses or something. The

Colonel looks around the room, snorts in disgust, and picks a victim.

“Well, Mister Vang?”

Kao Vang blinks, clears his throat, and says hesitant,

“Preparedness?”

“By which you mean ... ?”

Vang clears his throat again, and speaks up a little louder.

“Preparing for the possibility of war?”

“And how do you do that?”

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“Uh, training. Drilling. Procuring weapons and stockpiling materiel.

And, uh—”

A southern-fried jarhead named Hudson gets a cocky smile on his

face and runs his hand up. The Colonel nods to him.

“Studying the opposition’s resource deploymentalization!” Hudson

booms out. “Evaluating possible confrontational venues, prioritizing

mission objectives, and projectionizing the cost/benefit of various

hostile engagement scenarios!”

I saw Hudson accidentally cut himself once. He didn’t bleed. He

exsanguinated.

The Colonel turns away from us, and does another lap. Pausing, he

looks up again. “Let me phrase it a different way: What is peace?”

“A period of cheating between wars,” Singh blurts out.

“That’s the smartass answer,” the Colonel says with a glare. “I want

an objective definition: What is peace?” He looks at us, sharp. We all

look at each other.

After a minute or so of silence, the Colonel sighs and tries again.

“Okay, Singh, let’s follow up your line of thought. What does

Machiavelli have to say about peace?”

Singh smiles, proud, and raises his voice. “Peace is the breathingtime

which gives you the leisure to contrive, and furnishes the ability to

execute, military plans.”

The Colonel freezes and points at Singh. “Lock in on that thought. A

time to
contrive plans
. How do we contrive plans?”

We all look at each other a little more, then Kao Vang clears his

throat and speaks up. “Well, the various divisional staffs—”

“That’s tactical planning,” the Colonel interrupts. “Who’s

responsible for strategic planning?”

“The Joint Chiefs of Staff?” Vang hazards.

“But even that takes place within a larger context. Who defines the

mission statement? Who sets the ultimate goals?” We blank again.

The Colonel frowns. “Okay boys, here’s an easy one. What’s

Clausewitz’ first dictum?”

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Everybody’s right hand shoots up. “
War is only politics conducted

by other means
.”

“Nice to know you’re well-conditioned little idiots,” he grumbles,

not really to himself. Then he stops, parade rest, takes a deep breath, and

looks up at us.

“Here we have the essential fallacy of Clausewitz!” he booms out.

“
On War
was written in a culture and at a time when military and

civilian leadership were interchangeable. He could as easily have said,

`Politics is only war conducted by other means,’ and he would have been

just as correct—for his time!

“But times change. Cultures change. Political institutions grow and

evolve in an organic fashion. In a very real sense, a human society is a

colony organism!” He pauses. We all blink a little and try to decide how

we feel about being called a bunch of uppity sponges.

The Colonel lowers his voice and continues. “Clausewitz was

correct—for the organism of which he was a part. But contemporary

society is much more complex; the organism is more clearly

differentiated. Try to apply Clausewitz literally today, and you can

easily conclude that the sole function of the military is to serve domestic

political expediency!”

Yeah, that seems to follow. The Colonel turns and paces a bit. “This

single concept,” he says without stopping, “is responsible for more

stupid debacles than any other phenomenon in modern history.

Consider: Vietnam. Lebanon. Cuba. The Proxy War. While military

force without the will to use it is like tits on a boar—” He stops, turns,

raises a finger in the air like he’s going to indict God Himself.

“
Will
without a clear knowledge of the value
and limits
of force is a

recipe for disaster!”

He pauses, and looks us over, searching. I suddenly flag this is a

critical point and scribble
tits on a boar
on my notepad.

“I suggest,” the Colonel says softly, “that the biological analogue of

contemporary society is the human brain.” He makes a chopping gesture

with his left hand, then turns it palm up as if holding something. “On

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one side, you have the military command structure.” He turns his right

hand up. “On the other, the civilian political system.

“Two autonomous hemispheres. A human brain, but with a divided

corpus callosum.” He looks at his hands, and then at us. “So, I put it to

you again: What is the legitimate mission of the military in peacetime?”

He scans us over, sharp, looking for signs of intelligent life. Hudson

gets a confident look and raises his hand. The Colonel makes eye

contact. “Mister Hudson?”

“Domestic surveillance and political management, sir!”

The Colonel snorts, derisive. “You’ll be a big hit with the

Nixonistas, Hudson, but fortunately most of the U.S. is still a

democracy.” He resumes scanning us. “Anyone else have an idea?” I

must be goofing up somehow, because he locks his sights on me.

“Mister Harris?”

When in doubt, jargonize. “To maximally facilitate the

infrastructure interface,” I say as if it’s perfect obvious.

The Colonel looks at his shoes and chuckles a little. “You have a

great future ahead of you in law, Harris. I didn’t understand a thing after

`to.’” He looks up again, still chuckling, and scans us over once more.

“Consider the last hundred years,” he says at last, soft and serious.

“In every military action our nation has taken—
every
one—the question

of victory or defeat has been decided long before the first shot was fired.

Decided by the diplomatic objectives set by the civilian government.

Decided by the scope of action the right brain—,” he shook the

imaginary lump of political gray matter in his right hand at us, “—

allowed the left. Decided by the weapons procured, the negotiating

positions taken, the rhetoric used.

“Decided by the civilian government in light of what it
thinks
the

military can do!”

He looks at the floor and raises a finger to his lips as if shushing us.

“I submit to you,” he says softly, “that the legitimate role of the military

in peacetime is
education
. Your first duty is to ensure that your civilian

political leaders have a clear understanding of what you can and cannot

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do. They need to know what your
real
capabilities are.”

His voice drops to a low, ghost whisper, just barely audible above

the cruel March wind. “If to no one else, you owe it to the men you

command to ensure that their lives are not pissed away defending some

fool’s re-election speech.”

#

REALTIME LOCK-IN: The sky is clear, bright, French royal blue.

The hot June sun beats down hard, making my scalp sweat under the

black beret. I cop a surreptitious look down the line and flag we all look

uncomfortable as uncomfortable can be, but just about the time that the

lad next to me starts to keel over—(“Faint if you must,” Payne once said

to me, “but dammit, faint at attention!”)—just about the time his eyes

are rolling up, the windy old wheeze up on the reviewing stand finishes

the commencement speech and backs away from the microphone.

We emit maximum applause. The wheeze beams and nods,

obviously thinking we’re applauding his
content
. Then Gary Von

Schlager stands up, smiling sincere as any used-car salesman, shakes the

wheeze’s hand, and turns him over to a pair of weasels who guide him

into a comfty chair at the back of the reviewing stand.

With the addledoid safely out of the way, Generalissimo Gary steps

up to the podium and smiles at us. The sun glints impressive off his gold

epaulets; the gold piping and blue satin of his pseudo-uniform reflect

strange colors on his face. For a moment I look at his cheekbones, his

eyes, the line of his jaw, and I think about how much he really does

looks like his old man.

A little chill runs through me. I wish the old man were here now.

There’s a point I want to argue with him.

Colonel?
, I’d say,
you told us our first duty is to make sure our

civilian leaders understand our real capabilities
.

But sir? What if the civilian leadership
is
the enemy?

From the podium, Commandant Gary looks down at the assembly,

searching through the faces. He finds me, and gives me a smile and a

wink. I’m amazed he still does that.

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I mean, it’s not like I’ve been indiscrete. Those purchase

requisitions that were “accidentally” routed to the wrong vendor —one

who supplied real FDA-inspected beef, not the MUO (Meat of Unknown

Origin) Shaday’s company supplies—there’s no way anyone can prove

they were anything but a data hiccup. And after Gary finally bought me