CHAPTER 10
"Bad times come. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly. Nobody asks for bad times to come your way, but what matters is how you change with the times. You can curl up and whimper, or you can lick your wounds, get back up, and punch the bad times right in the nose."
Being a corporal sucks. I doubt there's anyone who served who would disagree with me, especially those of us who've had the "privilege" to personally achieve the rank. You're a non-commissioned officer so you really can't be "friends" with the lower enlisted. You're also the most junior of the NCOs which means you get very little respect, and ALL of the shit taskings, from the more senior NCOs. It pissed me off something fierce back then, but I can see why it was like that now. What did I think I knew about anything when I was 22? The rank doesn't magically give you new and wondrous slagging insight into the hearts of officers and enlisted. You're just you, with more dwang to be responsible for. Also, the pay rise isn't great.
I was the only non-clone section leader in the battalion at the time, not to mention the only corporal, and from what I found out later the command team seriously considered shuffling some people around so that I wouldn't be. But staffing, due to casualties, was already becoming a problem. So, we made a go of it. I think it went well anyway.
So anyway, after we shook off the boarding parties we were left with two nearly crippled warships in orbit and an already battle damaged regiment. The wisest course of action would have been to turn our happy-shebs around and come back later at full strength. It has been my experience however that officers hate doing things that make sense. Making too much sense was very likely a crime punishable under ICMJ (imperial code of military justice).
So instead of the smart choice we decided to blast our way through, LAND our ships on the fragging planet and commence with the sheb-kicking. I do understand nobody wants to go home a loser, but it was ridiculous. My guess is that with the task force commander being dead some piddly little junior Navy dog was going to have to take responsibility for this mess if'n we'd turned back. Taking responsibility in this instance probably meant a firing squad. So, on we went, through hell and high gravity, to pacify Balmorra.
That was a hell of a ride, let me tell you. Nothing like taking flak going through atmo to get your blood pumping. Normally space battles are so quiet, but this was anything but. The ship shuttering and jumping, electrical panels blowing out with the heat stress. I think the ship took more damaged going down to the planet than it did from enemy fire. Then we hit the ground running.
Balmorra has guns, LOTS of guns. It's also the birthplace of the Walker, the Hopper, the T-7 and most artillery pieces. Lucky for us merely having guns doesn't make you proficient in their use. That was our real advantage at first; we were better trained tactically and strategically than the civilian population, just not better armed. That being said it was a pretty brutal campaign, lots of casualties, on both sides.
We started with the liberation of Bis City, the capital of the planet at the time. Surprisingly not too difficult. The city was mostly administrative drone types, artisans and white collar workers, most of whom were glad to see us. Of course, there were a few members of the service industry who decided it would be fun to get shot.
I remember a particularly loud mouth coffee shop barista who launched into a speech about liberty and equality and some other such rot before throwing a detonator at us. The idiot armed the thing first then started yammering at us; blew himself up somewhere in the second paragraph of his speech. At least I didn't have to listen to the whole damned thing.
After the city was back under control things became more difficult. It was an interesting experience, being on the side with less firepower. It makes you appreciate how bad things usually sucked for rebel forces. Fighting a Walker on foot is no fun at all. Good learning experience though. I already knew the strengths of all our weapon systems but got a real appreciation for all the weaknesses too. The joints on the Hopper's legs are the weakest point of the thing. It also doesn't do well with moving terrain (landslides and such). But the kneecaps were the place to shoot; if I overcharged Zeetha I could take em out with a few good shots.
There WAS some rumbling among the sergeants about having a section chief use the big gun. Typically, the auto-gunner is one of the mid to lower ranking members of a squad. But I was never ordered to stop, so I kept on using her, probably because I was fragging amazing with her.
Walkers are pain in the arse, which was trouble on Balmorra, but before and after has saved my life innumerable times. Their biggest weakness is against CAS (close air support) which of course we had very little of, the fighter hangar bays having been blasted pretty hard in the space ambush. Lucky the rebs didn't have any CAS either. Other than that, you want to use missiles on the neck of the beast right where it meets the head. I've heard people claim that a good sniper can put a high-powered bolt through the vision visor but I'll believe that when I see it. Although I can testify that the walkers own turbolaser can do it if the Jedi are involved.
The whole thing was just such a patchwork campaign, no solid plan, no big overarching strategy. Our biggest concern was trying to capture supply points and arms warehouses to resupply ourselves. Maybe upgrade our weapons systems but mostly just to deny the resources to the rebs.
I think the problem was that in the low-supply environment every individual unit developed a hoarder mentality. If YOU captured a Walker you sure as slag weren't giving to some OTHER unit. So instead of having a battalion of walkers in the regiment each company might have one or two or none. When your force is equipped so non-uniformly it's hard to get a standardized strategy in place. Same went for every other form of supply. Food, water, UF-8 were all in high demand everywhere. So, your supply guys would trade amongst themselves with sometimes interesting results. There was a whole month we spent out in the dust where all we had to eat were meiloorun fruits. That's it, meilooruns. Played hell with our digestive systems. Never found out what we got in return for THAT little trade.
But as I said it was a long, slogging campaign, almost a cycle and a half. Sgt Ripper came back about six months after we hit dirt; he'd needed a whole skull replacement which I understand is a tricky bit of surgery. It was lucky we took the city so quick, that kind of business needs a full hospital.
But in that six months I lost four of my guys. Jombe, the guy who got shot in the knee on the Imperator, was first. He dived on a grenade while we were on patrol the second week in Bis City. I know he felt that Sgt Ripper was his fault, which was stupid, but he saved my life and half the platoon's as well. first bit of paperwork I ever filled out as an NCO was his posthumous Silver Sun with V device. I lost Setch and Frin'l to IDF (indirect fire) about a month later. But worst of all I lost Tarvek.
The stupid kriffer broke cover throwing a det charge on a Hopper's belly and when the thing went up a piece of shrapnel sheared his right arm off just below the shoulder. He survived, but he opted for the medical discharge instead of the combat replacement and reenlistment. Arsehole.
But he came from money anyway. His prosthetic is way better than mine, synth skin and everything. We still laugh about it when I visit sometimes it because when the hopper blew and took his arm off he stumbled a bit but kept running. He didn't even realize he'd lost the slagging thing till he got back to the trench. Then, he tried to run back out and get it. "That's MY fragging arm, nobody gets it but ME" he roared. Shell shock and combat stims are a hell of a mix.
He wouldn't sit still and let the medics look at him, so I called "all front" and I rolled my happy sheb out there and got it for him. I dropped the slagging, smoking thing in his lap when I got back. He took one look at it, said "Oh. Good." then passed out. Arsehole. At least, I've got somebody to buy me drinks whenever I'm on Brentaal.
A few weeks after that Sgt Ripper finally came back, and stars was I glad to see him. The whole time I was in charge it felt like I was treading water, my head barely above the surface of the waves. Not that I'd ever been swimming before, biggest pool of liquid I'd ever been in was a bacta tank at that point.
Anyway, I expected, half hoped, that I would get downgraded back to private then. Leadership did not come naturally for me. I've seen troopers come in and be able to inspire men to follow them into hell within 15 minutes, real natural born leaders. But that's not me, I had to learn it. It's a skill like anything else, it requires practice and a good role model to emulate. Personally, I've always been a bit suspicious of those natural leader types. Charisma is all well and good but you need knowledge and experience to make it useful. Otherwise you're just going to get people killed.
But I didn't get downchecked. Sgt Ripper just made me his second, stuck me in the fire team leader slot and we rolled on. The next year was alright, about four months after we got Ripper back 2nd battalion captured an automated drop ship plant and we started getting air support. Finally, the damned Navy started to pull their weight.
Pretty soon after that it was less conventional warfare, more what we were used to, us vs guerrillas. Lots of explosive traps. For a few months one little group was putting explosives in air-lorries and droids and sending them up to the edges of our FOBs (forward operating base) to detonate. VBIDs and DBIDs (vehicle and droid borne improvised explosives) were a constant problem through most of my career but this was the first time I'd seen them.
The droids were the real problem; if you see a speeder flying at you with nobody in it you don't have to be a genius to know it's trouble. But a protocol droid? Nobody expects that to blow up, not the first time anyway. The only warnings you had were that they looked like hell and their vocabulators were all slagged. So, if it was ugly or it couldn't talk, you shot it. Quickly.
Stars I remember that first month they stared using them. You'd lose a trooper a day, minimum, and the real secondary effects were that we all got real paranoid. If it wasn't us we'd shoot it, and sometimes if the privates got real jumpy, they'd shoot at YOU too. Nothing like coming back from a 36-hour patrol and having a gate guard open up on you because he thought you were a droid. We didn't have any white-on-white (friendly fire) fatalities in my company, but it was a close thing a couple of times.
But to this day I can't stand droids, at least the humanoid shaped ones anyway. I won't have them in the house, drives my wife nuts. But I'll take her nagging over the screamers those kriffing things give me. Bunch of lurking metal shadows, clanking and buzzing lurching their way to me. Kriffing things. I'll take a little mouse droid any day, but the last time somebody brought a protocol droid to my house without warning me first I was up and had my vibroknife through its motivator before I realized I'd left my chair.
Finally, FINALLY the planetary governor declared the rebels defeated (again defeated in this context means under control) and we got the frag out of there. Our new home was the Liberator freshly forged from just down the lane in Kuat and christened in the Balmoran atmosphere. I was told she was state of the art, the Navy boys seemed to like her but she looked pretty much the same to me. Same Zoo, same armsroom, same bulkheads.
The real difference to me was that I was now an NCO, and instead of doing the normal boumashit, I was making others do it. I'll tell you, a year and a half of combat leadership really doesn't prepare you for all the little inane tasks and duties you have to perform in shipboard garrison as an NCO. All the annoying little duties that normally had been Sgt Ripper's job? Now all mine. Dwang always rolls downhill.
Performance counselling, inventory inspections and disciplinary action, all mine. I barely had time to make it to the section's unarmed combat practice (we actually had the whole company doing extra by then). Imagine fighting and laughing and generally taking the piss out of a bunch of your friends for a few years then being told you have to be a hard ass. It's not fun, there's a serious adjustment period between lower enlisted and NCO. In later years, any trooper who made it to NCO got an immediate transfer to, at the very least, a new company. Makes it easier to adjust from led to leader.
But we didn't do that back then, clones never had that problem I guess. But I did. Luckily as it turns out I am a complete arsehole, and had absolutely no problem kicking the ever-living slag out of any trooper who tried me. Which is why I made a point of never missing unarmed combat practice. If someone HAD gone gungan in the head I took the opportunity at next practice to "give them some pointers." Coincidentally these "pointers" often put them in the med bay for a day or two. I was very good; Sgt Ripper, who I now got to call just "Ripper" in private, was the only one who could keep up with me, but he was getting old.
When I'd joined back in '34 (that's 19 BBY) you could see that the old boys were getting old. Now in mid '39 they all had grey in their hair and a few were going deaf. Still fantastic soldiers but they were beginning to decline physically. Mentally they were all still there, thank the Emperor. That particular tragedy wasn't due for a few more years.
Other than having to kick a few more shebs than usual it was the same old boring shipboard garrison life, with a few minor exceptions. I had my own room for one. Stars above that alone was worth every bit of boumashit I had to put up with.
Your own space, and privacy, were always hard to come by as a private (pun not intended). You were always sleeping in the bays, and always working in groups. Being alone was a privilege. NCOs had privacy and it was glorious. I spent my first night in ship sitting up with the lights on, just because I could. I did whatever little thing came into my head without the fear of waking anybody up. Kriffing glorious.
Also, you no longer had to be accounted for every second of every day. I could leave the zoo, go to the Navy's commissary (which was always better stocked than ours). I could also go and use their DFAC, which again always seemed to have a better class of food, AND better a class of company. You still weren't allowed past L bulkhead of course, but if a Navy gal was willing, and surprisingly quite few were, you could find yourself a fair amount of dates in your liberty time. It was a lot like reception, you kept it casual because you never knew when the dwang would hit the fan and one or the other of you would get transferred or deployed, or dead. Just the way it was.
The key was respect. You treated her right, didn't go bragging to your boys about it afterward, and NO public displays of affection. Technically, in many cases it was fraternization and they'd string you up by your bollocks if someone had to take "official" notice. That always struck me as unfair, or at least a double standard. It was always the fella that got hemmed up in that situation, never the lady. Didn't matter who came on to who, in the end it was always the man's fault.
Anyway, the whole regiment was pretty banged up after the Balmorran campaign, we'd had an almost 30% casualty rate overall and some of the battalions were above 50%. So, we did a standard ship rotation, then were slotted for a "safe" deployment to Alderaan.
I can practically see most of you reading this flinch as I mention the "unmentionable." Yes, we destroyed Alderaan, I was on the Death Star at the time and I won't say that I didn't regret the necessity. Moff Tarkin was always the kind of general officer who liked to make "examples."
Alderaan was beautiful. Bet you're surprised I'd say THAT. As a downtown Coruscanti hiver I'd never really payed that much attention to scenery, it was just something got in the way of your blaster bolts. Weather was just something that made your life difficult most of the time. But Alderaan was something else. Mountains and rivers, green valleys and snow fields. It was stunning. Hell, even the architecture of their buildings was incredible; and considering that I normally have no appreciation for art whatsoever that's saying something.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I got a nice long opportunity to do nothing BUT look at scenery. The whole deployment was supposed to be nothing but a showpiece detail. We were there to lick our wounds, look pretty, guard the Imperial government buildings and to march in Empire Day parades, that sort of dwang. I guess nobody told the rebs that this was supposed to be our downtime. Some mother-kriffer tried to assassinate the Imperial Minister of… frag I don't even remember who he was. Whoever he was the rebs didn't much care for him though. So, they set up an ambush, mined roadway on a route he was taking. I was in the lead vehicle of the security detail, we took the hit.
Nothing prepares you for losing a limb. It's not painful in the same way being shot or stabbed is. Your brain just doesn't acknowledge that it happened. A Reb stabs you, or you break a bone during a combat jump you feel it. Your mind sees the damage and says "yep that hurts alright." You get blown up and lose most of a leg… your mind doesn't accept that right away.
I remember going flying, hitting the ground hard, scrambling for cover (they were firing at us from the hillside after the mines went off) and trying to take a knee to see over the wrecked speeder. That's when I realized how fragged I was, because I HAD no knee at that point.
Everything after that is a bit of a foggy blur. There was a lot of pain and shouting, and I remember telling someone not to worry about getting my leg back (guess I still remembered Tarvek's dumbarse at that point). But the next solid memory I have is being in the Hospital in Aldera.
I'd lost my right leg from just above the knee. There were other minor burns and cuts but the bacta took care of them before I even woke up. The Doc gave me the lowdown, left the room and almost immediately in strolled the battalion retention officer.
My initial contract with the Legion was for five years, which was the standard amount at the time. I'd not given my approaching ETS date (end term of service) much thought. Forward thinking, like the kind you do on the five to ten-year scale, was not something I did very well at this point. I was young and stupid; can you blame me?
But anyway, the retention officer laid out my options at this point. I could medically retire, I'd be given the salary for the rest of my term of service, as well as a bonus based on the degree of my disability. He "helpfully" gave me a cost estimate of a civilian prosthetic at this point, noting "sadly" that my estimated severance package most likely wouldn't cover all of it.
Or, and this he said with a blinding smile, I could reenlist for another five-year term and the Empire would give me a new leg for free. He also helpfully noted that at the ten-year mark I could retire, begin to draw a small pension AND (and this is what would eventually sell me) a land grant on the planet of my choosing.
I asked him if I could think about it, which was surprisingly non-impulsive for me. He nodded, gave me a friendly but slightly sad smile and said that I "mustn't wait too long." He gave me his comm-number and strolled out to go con some other fool. Stars, but I've met used speeder salesmen less smooth than that smarmy shutta. Honestly all I could think of doing was asking Ripper at this point, and as usual he came through for me.
He showed up about an hour after the retention guy left, closed the door and took off his helmet. I told him everything the doc and the retention officer said and then asked "What do you think?" He just looked at me and said "Do you have a plan?" All at once I realized that no, I had NO plan, no real useful civilian skills and no real desire to function in the civilian world. "Shit" I said. "Yeah, got us by the short hairs" he said shaking his head.
That, I think, was the first time I really felt like I had been accepted by the old boys. Ripper hadn't said "they got YOU by the shorties" it was "US." The implication being that we were the same, with no exit strategy from the legion and no real desire to use one if we had it. I wanted to ask what he would do when he got out, but I thought that now wasn't the time.
"You fail to plan, you plan to fail" we used to say in the Legion. It's very much a part of the culture, you make plans. Sure, you have to be ready to change the plan at a moment's notice, but you always HAVE a plan. Any vet of my era is always a bit of a nag about planning. When, where, what and how many are essential bits of information, so be prepared for us to ask those kind of questions… repeatedly. Doesn't matter what the op is, assaulting a fortress or planning a weekend get-away, we want details.
There really wasn't much more to talk about after that. Later, Ripper and I would talk more about that land grant retirement program. The Emperor had made the senate approve the bill earlier that year and had made sure the clone troopers we included in it. It turned out Ripper already had his eyes on a little chunk of dirt way out in the mid rim. You've probably heard of Naboo I bet. Fuckin' Naboo, there's a shite-show if ever there was one.