Army Careers Centre — Cambridge | November 2002 | 09:41
The office was designed to be welcoming in the specific way of institutional spaces that understand welcoming matters but have limited tools for producing it: a framed photograph of the regiment, a motivational poster that had been on the wall long enough to have curved at the corners, two chairs positioned at the angle of a conversation rather than a confrontation.
Sergeant First Class Kevin Davies had been doing this for eleven years. He had seen every kind of person who walked through that door — men chasing glory, men who needed a wage, men running from things they did not want to name, boys who had watched too many films. He had developed, over eleven years, a reasonable taxonomy of the impulses that brought people to him, and he could usually place someone in it within the first two minutes of conversation.
The young man who came in at 09:41 sat down, placed his hands in his lap, and looked at Davies with eyes that were a clear, specific blue. He was twenty-three. Cambridge honors degree in virological sciences, top of his cohort, the kind of academic record that made Davies wonder briefly if the file had been left on his desk by mistake.
He gave him the two minutes. Then he gave him three more. Then he picked up the file again and read it for the third time because he was still not certain he had placed this person correctly.
"You're a Cambridge graduate," he said. "Honors. Virology." He set the file down. "Son, you should be in a research lab making twice whatever I earn in a year. What are you doing here?"
"I'm done with theory," Alen said. His voice was even — not the evenness of someone performing calm but the evenness of someone for whom calm was simply the resting state. "I need to be somewhere the work is real."
"The work here is real, I'll grant you that," Davies said. "It's wet and it's cold and people will try to kill you, and that's before we discuss the food." He watched the young man's face for the flicker of doubt that usually arrived at this point. Nothing. "Why Infantry?"
"Because I need the fundamentals," Alen said. "I need to understand what the body can do under genuine stress. What the mind can sustain. Not from papers." He looked at Davies with an expression that was not quite readable but was not quite opaque either — something careful underneath the calm. "I need to know what I'm actually capable of."
Davies considered this. It was not, technically, an unusual thing for a recruit to say. People frequently arrived claiming they wanted to test themselves. What was unusual was the way it came out — not as the slightly theatrical declaration of a man performing toughness, but as a quietly stated operational requirement. He needs information, Davies thought. That is what that sounds like.
"Raccoon City," Davies said. He had noted the date on the application — October 2002, two weeks after the fourth-year anniversary coverage had run in the serious papers. "Is that what this is about?"
Something shifted in Alen's face. Just slightly. The first thing Davies had seen move.
"I've been following the subsequent incidents," Alen said. Not the question Davies had asked. But an answer. "The official categorizations. The gap between what the data shows and what the reports say." He paused. "I spent four years reading everything I could find. I don't want to read about the next one."
Davies was quiet for a moment.
He had seen men arrive with purpose before — genuine purpose, the kind that came from something specific that had happened to them or someone close to them. He had recruited those men and they had generally been either very good soldiers or very difficult ones, sometimes both. The specificity of the purpose was useful in training. The rigidity of it could be a problem in the field, when the situation required adaptation and the man's purpose was not flexible.
This young man had something else. Not rigidity — the opposite of rigidity. He sat in the chair with a quality of settled attention that Davies associated with experienced operators, not graduates. Like someone who had already decided every argument against being here and had answered them all before walking through the door, and was now simply waiting.
"What do you expect it to be like?" Davies asked. "Honestly."
Alen considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Harder than I've prepared for. Differently hard than I anticipate." A beat. "I expect to be wrong about several things. I intend to correct the errors and continue."
Davies put the file down.
Eleven years. He had been doing this for eleven years, and he had not had an answer quite like that, and he had not had eyes quite like that, and he had not been able to place someone quite like this in his taxonomy, and he was fairly sure that meant one of two things: either this young man was going to wash out in week three when the reality of Basic Training met the theory of his intention, or he was going to be one of the ones Davies remembered.
Davies had learned, over eleven years, that the ones you remembered were worth the paperwork.
"Right," he said. He opened the drawer for the enlistment forms. "Let's get started, then."
* * *
The forms took forty minutes. Davies had never processed enlistment forms in forty minutes before; there were always questions, clarifications, the usual anxious back-and-forth over the medical history section. Alen read each form once and signed it without questions, which was either the sign of someone who knew exactly what they were agreeing to or someone who had already worked out that the forms were not where the relevant information lived.
At the end, while Davies was collating the paperwork, Alen asked one question.
"The specialized programs that don't appear in the standard career path literature," he said. "Who sees the performance metrics from Basic Training?"
Davies looked at him.
"Performance data goes upward through standard channels," he said carefully. "Exceptional metrics get flagged."
"Good," Alen said. He stood and picked up his jacket. "Thank you, Sergeant."
He walked out. Davies sat for a moment with the completed paperwork in front of him and looked at the closed door and thought about the word
flagged
and the particular quality of someone who had just learned exactly what they needed to know.
He filed the paperwork. In the comments field, in the small box labeled NOTABLE CHARACTERISTICS, he wrote four words:
Watch this one carefully.
END OF CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chapter Fifteen follows...