Strange Company by Nick Cole (best ebook reader for ubuntu txt) 📕

Hell, PT’d. Every day. In the cool morning, in the misty blue darkness he’d do strength and resistance training. End of day and you’d find him doing light cardio. Night came and we’d sit in the jungle dark, running ambushes and smoking the supply trains making their way down the mountain. A few hours’ sleep here and there. Then do it all over again.

It was brutal.

By the third night they were on to us and half the company was combat ineffective from the snake insect toxin. Even Stinkeye was out of his mind and raving like a lunatic about some big dead neutron star that was really just a data cloud where the Monarchs kept all their secrets to themselves. The ones they didn’t want to share with anyone. Even with themselves. The stuff he went on about made you shudder.

“The Darkstar is where the truth goes to die!” he’d shout and spray his gutter liquor breath everywhere in the heat as we climbed another four thousand feet higher all that hot sweaty day. No one wanted to take the flask away from him due to the company superstition regarding it. So he drank and raved, and it wasn’t much different than how he normally was. At least he was walkie-talkie.

Gains, he kept us all together. Later we theorized that even though we were literally getting bitten to death, it was his PT sessions that kept his system detoxed enough to mitigate the buildup of flying snake poison each day.

Flying snake poison. The universe sure is a fun place, kids. Go interesting places, shoot interesting people. Get bit by flying snakes and lose your marbles.

So, Gains is right there as you begin to lose your mind, pulling your primary and secondary weapons off your sweating, drooling, shaking frame, and making sure you can’t get to them ’cause you’re seeing things that aren’t there and talking about some really bad choices.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I can almost hear him saying now. “Let me take care of these for a while.” And then he’s got you anchored to him with some five-fifty and you’re off, following the rest of the company higher and higher up into the never-ending jungle hell.

Once the toxin built up, you had about four hours of madness before it flushed your system and made you weak as a kitten. A kitten with a fully automatic battle rifle because Strange Company still needed you back in position for that night’s ambush. But a kitten nonetheless. Trust me, this stuff made the flu seem like a pleasure cruise.

If you were still out of your mind and raving by nightfall, we gagged you and tied you up and the First Sergeant and his driver watched over you back at the rally while the rest of the company went off to do some locals.

The night the ambush on the ambush went down, it went real bad. Real fast. They had a pretty good idea where we were gonna hit them that night, and they came out of the darkness and hit us from all three sides. Company strength was most likely at less than fifty percent and those holding a rifle weren’t in great shape. Me included. I was out of my mind, but no one figured it out. I just kept telling myself to be cool and ignore the phantoms of my past. My platoon and the company needed me.

So, I put my hallucinogenic suspicions on the back burner and tried to act like an NCO who knew what he was doing as suddenly we got attacked from three sides.

I lost five pounds in sweat alone that night. And I don’t have much to spare. We fought for our lives for about six hours, and the last three of those saw some pretty reckless soldiering and outright ridiculous stunts just to stay alive.

Dawn eventually comes and the smoke of the battle doesn’t clear, it just mixes with the mist. We had dead in every direction. Halfway through the night, every element lost connection with each other and it was just all small groups for themselves.

Stinkeye, who was less crazy that night, in the first golden light of green jungle morning climbs out from under a pile of dead ambushers he’d pulled over himself once he was out of ammo and tricks. He’d gone off with his two ancient ever-grungy forty-fives to try and destabilize a push by the enemy that went down after three in the morning.

I was sure he was dead as we waited for dawn and watched for any of the corpses around our fighting position to start moving.

But Stinkeye was standing there in the golden morning light as we’re getting comm and getting pulled out by drop. Op’s over.

“Damn, Orion…” says Stinkeye and hits his flask. He’s clear. Not his usual wild and drunken self. He almost sounds like a normal-ish person as he gasps from the first blast of the hot jet fuel he’s just swallowed thickly. “Thought we was dead for sho. Damn slaughterhouse…” he mumbled and wandered off, staring at all the corpses.

We barely made it. Most of us that is.

It got close for everyone that night.

Back at base, showers ran for almost six hours. We got hot chow and racked after the medics, and some additional doctors, were brought in to resurrect us via high-grade pharmaceuticals.

Later the next day I got up. Most of the barracks was still asleep. It was quiet as a cemetery in there. I went out in the late afternoon sun wearing nothing but pants. Clean pants. The ones I’d worn, and carried, into the jungle were so shredded by the various violent flora and fauna, and caked in stinking mud, that there was no choice left but to burn them. So new combat pants felt like new skin. I went outside and there was Gains, lifting weights. I mean really lifting weights. Going for the record. His eyes were distant. Not the usual Gains the company knew. He was somewhere