Starship Troopers

It made it "mission accomplished" for the First Platoon of the Blackguards. Not very many other platoons, out of many, many hundreds, could say that; no queens were captured (the Bugs killed them first) and only six brains. None of the six were ever exchanged, they didn't live long enough. But the Psych Warfare boys did get live specimens, so I suppose Operation Royalty was a success.

My platoon sergeant got a field commission. I was not offered one (and would not have accepted) -- but I was not surprised when I learned that he had been commissioned. Cap'n Blackie had told me that I was getting "the best sergeant in the fleet" and I had never had any doubt that Blackie's opinion was correct. I had met my platoon sergeant before. I don't think any other Blackguard knew this—not from me and certainly not from him. I doubt if Blackie himself knew it. But I had known my platoon sergeant since my first day as a boot.

His name is Zim.

My part in Operation Royalty did not seem a success to me. I was in the Argonne more than a month, first as a patient, then as an unattached casual, before they got around to delivering me and a few dozen others to Sanctuary; it gave me too much time to think—mostly about casualties, and what a generally messed-up job I had made of my one short time on the ground as platoon leader. I knew I hadn't kept everything juggled the way the Lieutenant used to why, I hadn't even managed to get wounded still swinging;

I had let a chunk of rock fall on me.

And casualties—I didn't know how many there were; I just knew that when I closed ranks there were only four squads where I had started with six. I didn't know how many more there might have been before Zim got them to the surface, before the Blackguards were relieved and retrieved.

I didn't even know whether Captain Blackstone was still alive (he was in fact he was back in command about the time I went underground) and I had no idea what the procedure was if a candidate was alive and his examiner was dead. But I felt that my Form Thirty-One was sure to make me a buck sergeant again. It really didn't seem important that my math books were in another ship.

Nevertheless, when I was let out of bed the first week I was in the Argonne, after loafing and brooding a day I borrowed some books from one of the junior officers and got to work. Math is hard work and it occupies your mind—and it doesn't hurt to learn all you can of it, no matter what rank you are; everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.

When I finally checked in at O. C. S. and turned in my pips, I learned that I was a cadet again instead of a sergeant. I guess Blackie gave me the benefit of the doubt.

My roommate, Angel, was in our room with his feet on the desk—and in front of his feet was a package, my math books. He looked up and looked surprised. "Hi, Juan! We thought you had bought it!"

"Me? The Bugs don't like me that well. When do you go out?"

"Why, I've been out," Angel protested. "Left the day after you did, made three drops and been back a week. What took you so long?"

"Took the long way home. Spent a month as a passenger."

"Some people are lucky. What drops did you make?"

"Didn't make any," I admitted.

He stared. "Some people have all the luck!"

Perhaps Angel was right; eventually I graduated. But he supplied some of the luck himself, in patient tutoring. I guess my "luck" has usually been people—Angel and Jelly and the Lieutenant and Carl and Lieutenant Colonel Dubois, yes and my father, and Blackie... and Brumby... and Ace—and always Sergeant Zim. Brevet Captain Zim, now, with permanent rank of First Lieutenant. It wouldn't have been right for me to have wound up senior to him.

Bennie Montez, a classmate of mine, and I were at the Fleet landing field the day after graduation, waiting to go up to our ships. We were still such brand-new second lieutenants that being saluted made us nervous and I was covering it by reading the list of ships in orbit around Sanctuary—a list so long that it was clear that something big was stirring, even though they hadn't seen fit to mention it to me. I felt excited. I had my two dearest wishes, in one package—posted to my old outfit and while my father was still there, too. And now this, whatever it was, meant that I was about to have the polish put on me by "makee-learnee" under Lieutenant Jelal, with some important drop coming up.

I was so full of it all that I couldn't talk about it, so I studied the lists. Whew, what a lot of ships! They were posted by types, too many to locate otherwise. I started reading off the troop carriers, the only ones that matter to an M. I.

There was the Mennerheim! Any chance of seeing Carmen? Probably not, but I could send a dispatch and find out.

Big ships -- the new Valley Forge and the new Ypres, Merathon, El Alamein, Iwo, Gallipoli, Leyte, Marne, Tours, Gettysburg, Hastings, Alamo, Waterloo—all places where mud feet had made their names to shine.