The Living Will Envy The Dead Read Free Page A

fully.  I don’t mean that we were walking around with a broken leg or some other such nonsense, but we were no longer at the peak of physical fitness.  That wasn’t actually a problem and so we found ourselves being dragged into advisory roles.  We had actually been in combat and had seen the elephant…and we were perfect to tell some civilians just what was wrong with their war-winning gadget.  They didn’t have a fucking clue!
     
    No, I don’t mean that they were bad people; I mean that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what real combat entailed.  There was a firm, headed by this really hot babe – and boy, do I mean hot – which had come up with the perfect camouflage suit.  It might not have been the Predator’s perfect cloaking device, but a soldier could wear it and he would be invisible.  He would also be dead.  It worked fine in the lab, but in the field the temperature just kept rising.  Back to the drawing board, we said, and we made it stick.  I don’t know how we got away with it.
     
    One thing led to another, again, and we found ourselves working on all kinds of committees.  The military has to be a planner.  Every so often, the media will ‘discover’ that the military has a plan to invade…well, insert your favourite enemy country here.  They missed the point, of course.  The Pentagon is supposed to have a plan for anything that they might be called upon to do.  There was no sign of hostile intent in coming up with the plans.  As you might imagine, they missed that point as well.  We worked on nuclear war plans – more on that later – disaster recovery plans and pretty much every kind of contingency that you could imagine.  Would you believe, really, that they even had a plan for alien invasion?  They did.
     
    Some of the scenarios were truly depressing.  There were some for expected civil wars in 2000, and again in 2008.  I hadn’t believed that either would have been likely, although there were moments before both elections when violence loomed its ugly head.  I even studied a book covering a civil war against an evil President and found myself wondering, grimly, where I would stand if it really came down to blows.  We had all kinds of interesting debates on the subject.  I might even have convinced a few civilians that I wasn't an asshole…and nor were the rest of the Corps.
     
    But I didn’t know what to do with myself.  Don’t misunderstand.  I was enjoying some of what Mac and I were doing, but it wasn't what I’d signed up to do.  What good is a Marine with a punctured lung?  The RCT had moved on without me, most of my friends had been promoted or had left the Corps – or had been killed, in a handful of cases – and I had been left behind.  I spent a year as an MP in Afghanistan, but that wasn't really me, somehow.  It was Mac who suggested the solution, in the end, and who pulled strings on my behalf.  The town of Ingalls needed a sheriff and I, a Marine, was an ideal choice.  The people in smaller towns tend to be more patriotic – it may be because they know more soldiers, proportionally speaking – and besides, Mac’s family had lived there for generations.  I wasn't sure, at first, but hell, it sounded like a change.  I moved out, settled in, learned the ropes, met the people and ended up enjoying myself…
     
    And then came the war.

Chapter Two
     
    A nuclear war could ruin your whole day.
    -Anon
     
    I wasn’t there at the time.
     
    That should be obvious.  I wasn't the President of America, or the President of Russia, or one of the other world leaders during the years before the war.  I wasn't making decisions on a strategic level.  I might have been working on operational plans, but I never actually had to put one of them into use…and I certainly never ordered that any of them were to be used.  I can only tell you what I saw at the time, from the outside, and what was pieced together later, sometimes much later.