Third Person - Complete

Three Steps

Lewis winced as she sat down on the sandbags, setting her rifle down and taking her helmet off. She unbuckled her LBE and went to open her Kevlar vest when a brown haired man reached over, putting his hand on her stomach. When Lewis looked at him he shook his head.

"Don't open your vest down range. Ever," The guy said.

Lewis frowned, looking around. Other people had their vests open, some had even taken off their Kevlar vests as well as their BDU tops.

"But they have," She argued.

The guy shook his head. "If Stillwater sees you in a downrange area with your vest open, he'll make you wish you'd never joined the Army," The guy said. "He's dead serious about it."

Lewis frowned. "Why?"

Before the guy could answer there was a series of "bloop" noises, and a second later the 40mm rounds hit the targets, going off with a crack.

The guy jerked his thumb at the range. "That right there. Those grenades throw shrapnel. Bullets ricochet. Stillwater doesn't want anyone mangled by shrapnel."

"Just tell her, Putter," Stokes said from where she was leaning against another pile of sandbags with her helmet tugged down over he eyes. "She's Atlas, she'll hear about it any way."

"A couple years back we lost our crew medic to a sniper when she opened her vest," The guy, Putter, said. "Last year the platoon lost our lieutenant when a chunk of shrapnel blew off a tank by a LAW hit her in the chest. Soviet fire to the first, blind luck on the second."

Lewis nodded, keeping her vest closed. The more she heard of Atlas, the worse the place sounded. She was nervous as hell about going out there. From the way they'd made it sound, it was covered in chemical weaponry, radioactive, and had mines and unexploded artillery shells scattered all over place.

The radioman, Foster, that she'd seen fight up on the fourth floor, came wandering up. For some reason, to Lewis, it looked like he just shambled everywhere like his parts weren't all properly connected together. He unslung the radio on his back and sat down next to Lewis.

"Ant's still trying to qualify on his sixteen," Foster said.

Stokes laughed. "Every goddamn year," She said, shaking her head.

"He qualified expert on the M3 and the .45, max scores, but that sixteen is giving him fits again," Foster grunted, shrugging his shoulders. He lifted up the headset and listened in. "Operations Platoon did so badly that Colonel Henry is talking about having another round of qualifications. Less than a third of Motorpool qualified, and most of First Magazine flunked out."

"That's not good," Lewis said, hoping to join the conversation.

"No, it isn't, Private," Foster said, still listening to his headset. "Huh, Hamilton is saying that when we get back he's going to check the barrels because of how shitty our weapons are. He says just by the law of averages more people should have qualified."

"What's wrong with our weapons?" Lewis asked.

Stokes tapped just above trigger on her rifle. "You had an M-16A1 in Basic, right?" Lewis nodded. "Well, take a look at your rifle."

Lewis looked at it. The first thing she noticed was that the blackish paint was worn away in a lot of places, exposing the metal. She saw her serial number, 11315B3, which looked a little odd, then she saw what Stokes was talking about. It should have said M16A1, instead, stamped into the metal, was XM-16-E1. When she looked up at Stokes the bigger woman nodded.

"These are test-bed weapons from the 1960's weapon trials. Some of them were handed out in Vietnam, we're talking like back in '66, and were replaced by the M16A1 pretty quickly," Stokes said.