Not a single soul received a uniform which fit him.

Doesn’t that intrigue you? Obviously any hastily-assembled bureaucracy will make mistakes, perhaps more often than not. The chaos of mobilization after twelve years of institutional denial certainly amplified this tendency. But consider the odds. Hundreds of thousands of men inducted in the first twelve months. Not a single case of a well-fitting uniform. Surely a great industrial nation could find its way to fitting properly at least some of its men, but America did not. Why not?

We didn’t let it happen, we of the Resource Optimization Board. We wrote very detailed, very careful instructions on how to measure an inductee for a uniform. We carefully streamlined the system so that even an imbecile could execute it perfectly. And then we calibrated it so that it would always yield an incorrect result – and do so in a way so subtle that the very examiners never noticed.

How could it be? Didn’t we realize that the comfort of a man’s uniform is the first major factor in his morale? Troops in good uniforms fight harder, last longer, complain less. An uneven shirt can throw off a man’s concentration. Too-tight pants can ruin a good sniper’s aim. A mismatched boot can disrupt a private’s step – a division’s worth of mismatched boots can destroy a campaign. We knew this. I measured and calibrated it. Other than a working weapon, there is little that a good soldier will crave more than a solidly-fit uniform.

And that’s the point, of course. These troops were in training for eight weeks. They knew they weren’t going anywhere and they knew they weren’t getting new uniforms from the quartermaster. It became a grand experiment: What would they do? Many, indeed most, complained loudly and often, and otherwise resigned themselves to weeks, perhaps years, of ill-fitting misery. But some… some worked out their own accommodations. Some inductees had worked with cloth in their civilian lives – tailors and the sort. They did not suffer more than a day or two before correcting the obvious flaws in their own uniforms. They rapidly learned to make some money on the side fixing the uniforms of their comrades.

Other inductees had no such skills but could lead, or motivate, or learn. One enterprising solider from Bayonne organized a battalion-wide swap of mismatched parts. He surveyed the ranks and paired the too-tall with the too-short, the thin with the wide, etc. He executed massive rounds of exchanges. And he did it all without using any official channels, without the quartermasters corps being any the wiser.

It was evolution, you see. We threw them into an environment maladjusted for their comfort. Then we saw who adapted and who sank, who progressed and who faltered. The uniforms were just one aspect. At one point, the Board had fifty two distinct variables being tracked and optimized – housing assignments, food, censorship policy for mail. We had eight weeks, less really, to sort the wheat from the chaff, and we used every method available to us.

And it worked. We created the Service from whole cloth in less than six months. It took Streiberg three times as long to engineer his miracle, and he had an example to work from. Six months and we invented an entirely new military organization – while also providing the Army with the men it needed. The like had never been done, and I dare say, it will never be repeated.

On our way through Maryland, we’d picked up an elite cavalry company. Nowadays that would mean Zeds and PFs, but this was still the start of the war. Cavalry still meant horses. On the morning of July 9, the brass had them assemble for a reconnaissance in force. As it happened, the marshalling grounds wasn’t that far from where my spiderhole was. So, even though it wasn’t quite regulation, I got Deek to cover for me and I snuck back to watch them get ready. It was pretty stirring. I mean, I’ve seen troops on horses, but never more than a few at a time. The cavalry didn’t mix with us grunts, even during war games, and I hadn’t run across them before.

Now I watched, almost in awe, as the men in deep blue mounted up. They all wore a stern look on their face, a look of ages whether they were twenty or fifty years old. These were the best of the best and they knew it. They didn’t have time for the everyday. A bugle played a long, drawn-out tune, something with the pep of reveille but serious. The troop moved off, trotting in tight formation, not a single one looking back.

I scrambled back up to my little patch of Pike Hill. It was something, I told Deek. These guys meant business. As soon as they’d made contact with the enemy, we’d be in for it.

The day wore on. Once or twice there was another Black Smoke scare, but it didn’t infect the whole line this time. Guys found ways to relax, to wait for the word from the recon force. It was almost possible to think this was just another exercise, that any minute the non-coms would gather us up for a debriefing and the Colonel would berate us in his quiet but devastating manner for all the mistakes we’d made.

Around sunset, there was movement from the direction of Atlanta. I tensed up, sighted my Lem gun along the ridge. There were definitely things coming our way, shapes ill-defined in the failing light and smoky haze. Then I relaxed a little bit. I could see it was horses – the cavalry on its way back to report. We’d know the situation soon enough. (“We” meaning the brass, of course.)

Then Deek tapped me on the shoulder. The color had drained from his face. I looked again and started to notice things that didn’t fit right. First, there weren’t nearly enough horses. Dozens had ridden out. Now I could only see three coming towards us. All three were stumbling and drifting. As I watched, one gave up the ghost and tumbled to the ground. The other two just kept coming. That’s what made it clear to me that the horses were riderless – the cavalry wouldn’t leave a man down, not without being under fire, not this close to the friendly lines.

Then one of them started walking in circles, letting loose a mournful, primal low. Once it turned, I could for the first time see its left side. What showed there nearly brought my dinner back up my throat. It had been seared clean through. Some skin hung limply on its side but I could see exposed bone, though blackened. How it had kept moving, I’ll never know. Some instinct to get home, I suppose. But it couldn’t carry the poor thing any further. It just walked in unsteady circles and cried its melancholy anguish.

A shot rang out next to my ear and I jumped about three feet in the air. When I had recovered, I saw Deek laying down his rifle. Looking back, I saw that the half-cooked horse was dead, a single shot through its brain.

G*d help me, the last horse just kept on coming, like it knew it was almost back to camp and it was going to brave Hell to get there. Its chosen path took it straight at Deek and me, right past our spiderholes, in a macabre reversal of its original parade out not eight hours before. Deek raised his rifle again, getting ready to end its misery too if called for. Then his eyes grew large as saucer plates. He dropped the rifle and bent over. I could hear him retch. This nearly set me off, because Deek had always been steadier than me. I’d never seen anything get his number.

But now I could the horse just like he did. It seemed remarkably intact, especially in light of its two companions. No burn marks, no blood, no scorched bones. But… but the right stirrup was empty and the left one wasn’t. Something had cut through the bone cleanly and left the lower half of the leg in place.

I held onto my dinner but barely. All I could think was, whatever had done this was out there and coming this way. I knew in my bones that, before we saw the daybreak, we’d have seen our first glimpse of Marty.

No, once those reports came back from South America, there was only one way to remain ignorant of what we would be facing: You had to choose to stay so. Of course, most men can’t face the unpleasant future and retreat from it any way they can – by denial, if at all possible. So indeed many who should have known better chose not to see the crucible in which this nation found itself. But not all, not all. Some of us had our eyes opened, and we kept them that way. We began to plan, unofficially, behind the scenes.

When the news came from Russia, or rather, when it didn’t, it confirmed our suspicions. War was coming, and no oceans could shield the Republic this time. We would have to be mobilized and modernized. Unfortunately, rather more hid their eyes, and they controlled most of the levers of power. No monies would be forthcoming for recruitment, for training, least of all for new equipment and ordinance. As has always been true, the Republic would slumber until the invader was literally at our doorstep; then would the mighty giant rouse itself. Hopefully it would not be too late.

My task, during these tense and lean years, was to work out ways to shorten our time of vulnerability once war came. The world heaps accolades on Lem and Streiberg for their weapons of war. I stood in their ranks, no less an innovator; but my tools were human beings. I had to find ways for rapidly inducting, sorting, and training the masses who would be called to serve. When the hammer fell, we all knew, the entire nation would be pulled into this war.

Recall the prewar selective service bill? I wrote that for Senator Ramsey to submit. I also put together the questionnaires and aptitude tests that quickly slotted men into the specialties they would best fit. I designed the process of induction from start to finish. It was my idea to move the mandatory head-shaving from the medical examination up to the very front, right after the men surrendered their civilian clothes. I knew we had to break down their connection to their old lives. And we needed to deprive them of any psychological safe harbors, any feeling of potency and control.

I see from your shocked look that you have imbibed the false wisdom of my detractors. “The induction process dehumanizes the men,” bleated people too small to grasp my genius. Of course it dehumanized the men; that was its point. And we watched carefully for every little telltale sign of rejection, for every act of defiance no matter how small. We kept a fire watch for any man who could take the brunt of this process, of the worst the Army could hand out. Anyone who could do that and remain sane and productive – well, that man was ready for the type of war we would be facing. Our strategy teams desperately needed the unorthodox and unschooled. Perhaps ten percent of the recruitment pool could meet the bill. Those men were slated for rapid training in leadership. Eventually they became the strategy team as well as the leaders of just about every successful division out there.

Naturally, most men could not measure up in creativity, or in commitment, or in command. Eighty-five percent, on average, were not suited in the least for officer status. Dehumanize them? We made them even more what they’d already been: Plodding, docile creatures who – if you explained to them carefully and not too abstractly – could get the job done. We didn’t take anything out; we simply made them more of what they’d already been living.

What’s that? Ah, yes. Very clever of you to catch that. The last five percent. Did we make monsters out of the inductees? Bah. But we did know that something new was needed. If this war played out like the last nearly had, then the tenure of humanity as overlords of this planet was at an end – and perhaps, so was the species. History couldn’t be allowed to repeat itself. We needed who saw things we might shy away from. We needed something we’d never seen before. We needed men who could fight an opponent we’d never bested in a war we couldn’t imagine.

Make inductees into monsters? Bah. We did nothing of the sort. We were looking for the monsters already there.

But actually, I don’t think that was it. What I know of the service and of the politicos who control it, makes me think about point 4. Four, Pike Hill and environs were direct on the line linking Atlanta to Washington, and the very brass wanted to slow down anything headed toward the capital. If the walkers drifted the other way, well, that would be some ordinance Uncle Sam would save. Who the hell cares what happens to some farmer’s field in southwest Georgia? Officially, they couldn’t say that of course, but it isn’t too hard to read between the lines.

Over everything else, of course, you have to remember: As far as we knew at the time, the walkers had a week, maybe eight days before Grace would get ‘em. It wasn’t going to be no turkey shoot – if those walkers came across us, we were going to give them hell and probably still lose – but long term, the problem would solve itself.

Norcross was crowded with refugees when we arrived, but they’d already reached high tide. Anyone who could flee the city had done so; the stream of wretched people dwindled to a trickle even before we had unloaded the train. By the time we’d set up our defensive line on Pike Hill, there wasn’t anyone left to come. No refugees crossed that line. It was eerie, waiting inside our spiderholes, peering out in the direction of Atlanta. Nothing still – not people, not even wildlife. We could see the city burning. You couldn’t tell at this distance: Had someone just been careless in their evacuation? Or had Marty let fly with his heat ray and finished the job Sherman started? A pall of acrid smoke hung over the city and drifted over our line.

“Black Smoke!” someone cried and soon the dreaded words were flashing up and down the line, hopping about like the embers we could see through the binoculars.

“Black Smoke!” I don’t care how hot the Georgia sunshine was supposed to be. At those two words my blood ran cold. We’d heard all about Black Smoke, both in the official briefings and in the horror stories that filtered out of the first war and the CPs. Dime store novels liked to lay out in lurid detail the gruesome effects observed in anyone exposed to Black Smoke. There were a thousand ways it could get you: Your skin might bubble and boil and slough off, or your lungs fill with an ill black goop that crushed the life from you from the inside. Some people had their hearts burst in their chests, or the blood vessels burst in their brains. Some people just… expired, no visible trauma on them. It seemed that the Black Smoke had as many different effects as there were people to suffer them. But they all had one thing in common.

They were all uniformly fatal.

According to our briefings, the professors were still arguing over whether the Black Smoke was a chemical agent or a germ action. Hell, it was an open question whether there was just one Black Smoke. or whether Marty had many different weapons whose deployment he covered in the Smoke. The brain trust did assure us that the new anti-gas gear and procedures would protect us completely. I thought it funny that the brass never saw the intellectual whiplash caused by having the scientists admit they didn’t know anything and then having those same scientists swear by the new gear.

Add in the fact that any anti-gas equipment would have been bought by Uncle Sam from the lowest bidder, and you could see why the words “Black Smoke” could inspire such panicked frenzy. Someone would profit from the professors’ work, but it wasn’t likely to be us grunts.

On the other hand, any port in a storm, right? And low-bid equipment or not, I wasn’t going to face the Black Smoke without at least trying to save my life. So when that call went up, I scrambled into my gear as fast as anyone. From behind the close-set glass lenses, I watched the evil smoke drift toward our line, sidling up to us as if aware, looking for our weak spots. The silence was unnerving – in addition to the unnatural quiet of the morning, the gas mask itself muffled most sound. Eventually the cry of alarm had traveled all the way to the rear. Those of us in the front line just watched in silent anticipation as tendrils of that vile fog crawled toward our positions.

I could hear my own labored breaths as I struggled to inhale through the activated carbon filter – that is, when I remembered to breathe at all. The wisps of smoke mesmerized me the way a snake paralyzes its prey. I watched it inch closer to men I knew, men I’d trained with and played cards with and swore with. I could only watch in fascinated horror and wonder what their screams would sound like, and whether my own would sound braver or more cowardly when my own turn came a few minutes later. I almost longed for their screams; the slowly building silent anticipation was on the brink of driving me mad.

And then suddenly a noise – a shout, a cry! But not in pain or death. “The canaries!” bellowed someone from the frontmost spiderhole. “The canaries, they live!” This news flashed through the lines in exact emulation of the first panic. “It’s not Black Smoke – it’s just smoke. The canaries are alive!” With exultation, I tore off my mask and drank the hot Georgia air like it was the coolest spring water.

“Y’know,” drawled Deek Mumford, the grunt in the spiderhole next to mine. Deek acted the unsophisticated bumpkin but he had a mind like a steam machine – always wheels within wheels with Deek; always playing at a higher level. I guess that’s why he eventually got breveted to the officer corps. “Y’know, if I was Marty, what I’d do is this. I’d wait till the wind was from the southwest, then I’d fry some buildings and waft the harmless smoke towards us. And then, just as everyone saw the canaries still alive and began to relax, I’d follow it with a burst of real Black Smoke and catch everyone with their masks off.”

I’d disliked a lot of people in my life till then, some for reasons and others for none. I’ve beat up men for business. I’ve felt the scorn of a unreturned love and I’ve seen my fiercest foes succeed on my effort. But I had never hated anyone until that moment. I hated Deek as if he was the cause, as if it was his fault I couldn’t relax at the All Clear. I hated Deek for being right.

I hated him, but I got the d*mn mask back in place.

We got off that train to thunderous applause. About the whole population of greater Atlanta was in Norcross station, hoping to be elsewhere. A few of the boys stood a bit straighter once they saw them Southern belles watching ‘em. Master Sergeant Donovan moved back and forth along the train, screaming at us. “You think these people are glad to see you get off this G*d d*mned train? Well, grunts, you’re right – ‘cause that makes room for them to run the hell away from this sorry burg. Every second you spend dying here is one more second they can run to Washington, or New York, or wherever the hell they think is safe.”

Once he saw we were all off the train, he put us right back on, this time unloading the heavy equipment. People had been talking about the mechanized army for a while, but it didn’t happen until after Foothold, when we had no logistical choice. Back in Gwinnett County, we still did things the old fashion way, getting the zap cannon and Streiburg guns into wooden caissons and hitching ‘em to horses. The zap cannon were surprisingly light for artillery, but of course, you had to drag along their generators and condensers, so it all came out in the wash anyway. The Georgia heat was already rising and it was a dirty dusty few hours before the train was completely unloaded and we could take a half-hour to recuperate. I don’t mind saying, my best memory of Gwinnett County is of the daughters of Atlanta moving up and down the line with fresh cold lemonade. Makes me regret us not saving much of the city, but of course, that was still a bit in the future.

We’d hardly caught our breath when Master Sergeant Donovan and the other non-coms rousted us and got us marching. The Army in its collective wisdom had decided that Norcross was too populated – meaning had too many important civilians in it – to be the right point to defend. They moved us about five miles south-southwest to a tiny rise called Pike Hill. No sooner had we dropped our rucksacks then the Master Sergeant gathered us into formation. “This here is a regulation M1912 Reinforced Entrenching Tool,.” he bellowed, holding up a shovel. “After your rifle, this is your best friend. Treat it with respect, use it with zeal, and you just might live long enough to cry home to momma. With this entrenching tool, you will right now carve out your own G*d-forsaken patch of this G*d-forsaken hill, a spiderhole three feet wide by four feet long by five feet deep.” Predictably there were groans and swearing. Master Sergeant accepted it with Buddha-like calm. “If you are too good to dig a hole five feet deep, you lousy lazy idiots, then I promise you someone else will be digging you a hole six feet deep. Dig your spiderhole or dig your grave – that’s the only choice.”

He was right, of course. He knew firsthand what we had heard but failed to absorb: the walkers’ main weapon, the heat ray – it was strictly line-of-sight. Anything Marty could see, he could fry. But the heat ray had no shrapnel effect, no ricochet. Most importantly for us, it had no arc of attack. It came in along a line straight as a teacher’s ruler. As far as anyone had ever seen, the Martians had no stand-off weapon, nothing they could sit back and lob at us the way we were hoping to send 0.75 shells their way. A guy in a spiderhole was virtually immune to Marty’s attack unless the walker stepped right over him. A lot of our guys didn’t get it and skimped on their digging, making their hole too shallow. They mostly didn’t realize their mistake until first contact with the Marty, when they would take a look out at the battlefield and come back with the top of their heads boiled off.

Anyone who made it through the first assault quickly learned to adore their second-best friend, the M1912 Field Entrenching Tool. A shame how few that turned out to be.

Like I said, anyone made it out of Gwinnett alive, he owes it to a non-com. In my case, it was Master Sergeant Donovan. Donovan came out of Five Points, the meanest rotten neighborhood on the whole island of Manhattan. You might think that, him and me being Irish, and him being from just across the river, that Donovan and I would be almost like family. Not to Donovan, though. To hear him tell it, being from Brooklyn was like being from Mars – no, worse. At least Marty didn’t root for the Dodgers. He gave me the most hell than anyone in the unit – more, even, than Jorgensen, the big dumb Swede from Wisconsin. Any son of Brooklyn was the spawn of the devil, he let me know. I hated him with all my heart, for three days.

Then we made contact with the walkers, and suddenly everything he’d been screaming came back to me, and saved my life.

To my own credit, even while I was hating him, I was smart enough to pay attention. Part of it was intimidation, I’m not ashamed to say. Anyone who gets out of Five Points alive has to be either the biggest, toughest brute you can imagine, or cleverer and nastier than the Devil himself. Donovan was a scrap of a man, maybe five foot four on tippy-toes. My rucksack weighed more than Donovan. But he was a mean son of a gun, fast and vicious. He knew all these moves to turn a guy’s strength against himself, and he was quick as greased lightning. In the ring for a “friendly” Sunday round of fisticuffs, he threw Jorgensen three times the Swede’s own length.

All that being true, I wasn’t just afraid of Donovan, though anyone with brains is a little afraid of his own master sergeant. I was in awe of him, too, a lot more than I was of any of the actual officers. Because Master Sergeant Donovan had something that none of the newly-minted brass had. They had confidence, and they had shiny new lieutenant’s bars, and they had college, most of ‘em. They had brains, and wit, and even some charm. Master Sergeant Donovan had his booming voice and his unending supply of oaths and his infinite disdain for us. And one thing more. Master Sergeant Donovan had the Walker Cross.

Today you see Walker Crosses everywhere you look in the Service. It’s like they’re giving them out in the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes. But look closely and you’ll see that today’s version are plated tin. Donovan’s was the real deal, the original article. It was in gold. And just like today, it signified that the wearer had seen combat against a fully-active walker, and had lived to tell the tale. Today, with what we know, that ain’t as much as it was.

Anyway, with all respect for the position of the governor, it wasn’t our city and we knew we had time on our side. It’d probably be bad in Atlanta, proper, but we could just wait it out, track the walkers while they scouted the area. Wait for Grace, just like the handbook said. We were about to discover, the handbook needed rewriting.

I’d only been in the Army for a little under a year, but I’d already done my share of walker drills. ‘Course, they were only drills. No one in the States had seen a walker in a dozen years, maybe more. We had it all down on paper, but it was a little comical, really. We go out to the corn fields or wherever and chase around a pickup truck with a telephone pole sticking straight up and a sign in red, “Walker”. The officers were always trying to innovate new tactics to go with the new weaponry that’s been developed, but we only practiced “live” once, and the gear hardly worked then. Sometimes we didn’t even get Springfields and practiced with broomsticks.

In the event, the one was about as useful as the other, compared to heat rays and black clouds.

Asteroid CTO 12, christened “Gibraltar” and inevitably nicknamed “the Rock” by the spacers stationed there, constituted the primary staging area for Operation Foothold. Troops and materiel were shuttled to Gibraltar during its slow (approximately nine month) transit to Mars. Placed in a low-energy transfer orbit, the Rock nonetheless could not be readied before its first approach to the enemy planet. With supply lines stretching, the Service simply could not continue to resupply, much less augment, the base on Gibraltar.

In one of the most daring deceptions of the War, SACFEF convinced the Martians that Gibraltar had been intended as a planet buster that had failed to achieve the necessary orbital parameters. The base was reduced to a state of “hibernation” during its treacherous four-month swing through the Martian sky. The skeleton crew lived daily with the threat of the Martians piercing the deception and demolishing the base.

In light of the psychological stress inherent in such a situation, the few incidents on record become much more comprehensible…

This war and me, we go way back. My ma brought me into this world the night before the Grace. Well, to be more exact, G-Day in Brooklyn. So you might say I was getting started just as the walkers were winding down. Like any boy I kept an ear peeled for whenever someone’d report another lone cylinder. They weren’t scary then, more like pathetic. The papers would follow it for the seven or days it lasted, almost like following the ball game. People needed that, I guess, something that helped them forget how close we’d come. But I always knew in my bones they’d be back in strength eventually.

I signed up right after St. Petersburg. It’d been in my head since they announced the discovery of the Red Weed Field; I knew what was coming, but I didn’t want to admit it even to myself. But that changed when we started getting reports out of Russia — and when we stopped getting news from Russia, my mind was made up. So I was in the Service before there was a Service. Regular Army, back then, understaffed and underpaid. A fine American tradition.

Anyway, that meant I was under arms even before Minnesota and Georgia. My unit was mobilized after Minneapolis fell but we didn’t get moving before the cylinders came down near Atlanta. They boosted us down that way right quick. [laughs] I guess the brass in Washington looked at a map and saw it was only half as far to Georgia as it was to Minnesota. Anyway, we got down there a day after the cylinder opened. We had our new equipment but the really big stuff hadn’t made it yet. Some of that you had to move by rail; the old Zeds couldn’t lift it.

Things didn’t go the way they had in training. I’ll give you the full story some other time, but suffice it to say it was a combination of a hidebound Army and innovation on the part of the Martians. We got stomped, but we did withdraw in good order, trading ground slowly, doing it by the book. Hell, some of the less-bright types treated it like a game. We fell back on Norcross, in Gwinnett County, and waited for the Martians to be struck down by Grace.

Then we got the reports out of Minnesota. It was more than ten days past planetfall and the Martians weren’t dying…