The Next Warrior

Disembarkation - Part 3

Romero's mind was racing through periods of finely tuned alertness and a feeling of standing on the precipice of panic. In one instant, he was keen on every sway of the tiny ship's churning through the water and the fracas of noise from miles outside the craft. In the next lull, he was given over to imagining the night that was to come with its many visions of horrific nightmares born from his imagination. As a sudden roar of another jet echoed far above the landing craft, his heart began to race again. He had no words for this feeling. It wasn't fear. No, not only fear, at least. Fear was certainly there, but there was something more.

Gunnery Sergeant Yafante had told them of these moments, the moments when battle loomed and a warrior was given to a sort of hyper-vigilance that accompanies battle readiness. The sounds you heard were clearer, the lights you saw were brighter, and the smells were more distinct. An amplified experience of the world was about him then, a feeling he couldn't discern from the alertness of his battle hardened Gunny, or if it was simply paranoid claustrophobia mixed with the nausea of seasickness. More than likely, he assumed it was a fear of the unknown terrors awaiting him once he reached the jungle beyond.

To ease his mind, he looked to his fellow Marines in the cabin of the tiny vessel. His fire team, each seated to either side of him was handling the tension in their own way. Lance Corporal Fannon, the one they called "Su", short for Suicide, was asleep. How anyone could sleep in such an environment was beyond Romero, but Su was never one to give into the moment. He could sleep anywhere. He once said that an infantryman was always happy so long as he could get enough sleep. That's all it really came down to, Suicide believed. Sleep kept you focused when you needed to be. Sleep kept you relaxed and it didn't allow you to fret unnecessarily, burning calories getting psyched up worrying about things you had no power to control, exactly what plagued Romero now. It was as if the world never phased him.

Suicide was the Senior Lance of the fire team. Senior Lance wasn't exactly something written on his sleeve or on any government document. Basically, whoever had been in the longest of those who weren't yet NCOs in their own right, was the senior Lance Corporal and thereby received the mostly honorary title. Its chief honor, besides establishing the intramural platoon pecking order, was being the first one held responsible when one of the other Marines did something stupid. If there were no Corporals around, Suicide was going to get blamed for whatever idiocy was afoot with the other non-rates, either for being the instigator, which he almost never was, or for not preventing said stupidity from happening, a case which Kaiser provided him with often. It makes sense then, why he liked to sleep. It's hard to blame the guy who just slept.

Being Senior Lance was nothing to let go to your head, but it meant that Su knew how to handle himself. He knew his role. He knew his weapons. He knew his job. It didn't really matter that this was also his first combat engagement. If anyone would buy it on this deployment, they all believed, it sure wouldn't be Su.

Romero looked up to him and did whatever he asked, though he rarely had much to say and never pulled what little rank he had. It wasn't because Romero was still intimidated by Suicide... he was most definitely intimidated. Even after eight months of being part of this team, for Nathaniel, the longest he'd ever been with one, he still barely knew Su. No one honestly could say they knew him well. Of course, being introduced to a guy everyone calls Suicide doesn't serve to give a presence of warmth and welcome. Regardless of the distance he held from everyone, Su was still well liked for the very reason why Romero listened so intently when Su had something to say. Whatever he said always just seemed like the smart thing to do. Call it respect, or call it admiration. In reality, people did what Su said, as much as a survival tactic as anything else.

Lance Corporal Noam Kaiser was a different matter. He was Romero's closest friend in the squad these last few months. He'd been in a little while longer than Romero, a little under a year and a half when they set sail, but was the newest member of the team besides Romero. You couldn't have made a person less like Su than Kaiser. As the squad sat in that horrifyingly cramped, hot, dank, and noisy cabin on the way towards a battle with an enemy they knew little about and in a place none of them had ever been before, perhaps to all of their certain doom, Kaiser managed to handle the stress in his own way. With all the sense of purpose God gave to a sixteen-year-old girl, he was cracking jokes on the squad intercom channels.