Good soldier

Fiction. Fiction. Fiction. This is fiction. I have to write fiction. Flash fiction, it's called, I discovered the other day, from BT's interview on Youtube. Cool people. Getting their own interviews. Would I rather be the interviewer or the interviewee. Hmmm. Anywho. This is fiction. Shitfiction as I call it.

Number thirty-six-thousand-two-hundred-twelve was late. Like always. Thrun was tired of the stragglers. They were the prisoners, if they didn't follow the rules, then what was the point of the overwhelming force? Treat the prisoners with respect, they said, they could be valuable. He sighed. Oh I didn't realize we had personal twenty-kilo weapons that could decimate a small city so we could be respectful towards our enemies, he wanted to tell the officers know. That would not be received well. They had discovered a guard shoving and pushing the prisoners, and spitting on one of them. He was suspended for two weeks, and then demoted. Worst of all, they put him through two months of what they called 'sensitivity training'. Your prisoners are sentient entities too, treat them with the same respect you want if you are ever their prisoner yadda yadda yadda. Two seconds, that's it. What did they have the two months for.

Thrun felt emasculated sometimes. All these awesome weapons of war, incredible force, ability to annihilate and evaporate. The universe could be theirs. If only. If only they wanted. The desire was just not there. Responsibility, they said.

He understood some of it. They could become despots, with all that power. Power gets into people's heads, it corrupts you. The first lesson a cadet went through was self-control. How to not fight corruption when you have absolute power. You follow the rules. You become disciplined. You get the most charitable interpretation of the rules and follow them strictly. And you make no exceptions. Absolutely no exceptions. Never could a soldier justify killing civilians, even if they had stones in their hands. The rules of engagement were strict, and the punishment for breaking those stricter. It's not about the war, they were reminded every day, it's about how you maintain your standards. Follow the rules even when you can't, even when you think no one's watching. We fight against our enemies, but evil is not absolute. The bigger enemy we fight is the one inside us, put greater focus and effort in your fight against that evil. He understood that. It just felt...too..spiritual...too...hippie-ish, for wars.

They were brutal, those training sessions. The enemy had destroyed your comrades, your fighters-in-arms, and you were the sole one remaining. No one to check on you. They were disarmed and surrendering, and no immediate threat to you. Do you take them in control, or let anger and power get the better of you? Those sims were far too real, you felt the anger welling up in your veins, your head throbbing, ears thumping. They had killed every one of your friends. And now they were surrendering, powerless.

Most made it through, the academy was that good. The psychs happened every year, and randomly six or three months. If you had a history, you got them more often. General testing of your anger level, self control, all of that, time in the sim to see if your reactions were within the desired levels. They'd set up a chain of accountability. If a soldier went hogwild, not only was the commanding officer responsible, but so was the trainer, so was the psych evaluator, and the medic. How did you not catch this earlier, they asked. What can we do to prevent it. And what should happen if this happens again, with one of your charges. A soldier may go mad, but their madness was not personal, it was a joint responsibility with those who worked with them. And so were the punishments. There were adjustments obviously, for those that dealt with traditionally known problematic individuals and units, but the trajectory was important. A good soldier is a one who defeats the enemy, but a great soldier is the one who has complete eternal victory over the evil inside themselves.