The Buzzard landed, I got into a hamvee, which wasn't my personal Barney hamvee but a generic model, and we rolled out soon after, a potato-planting convoy of four hillbilly armored hamvees and six heavy tandem trucks. It irritated me that the convoy had been sitting around waiting for me; I'd hated waiting for officers when I was a grunt, now I hated making soldiers wait for me.

My hamvee smelled like feet, stinky feet. And, something like aftershave, or cologne? It must have been parked somewhere the hamsters had been using that nasty stinky fertilizer, then someone tried to deodorize it with cheap cologne. "Damn, this smells like my grandfather's cologne." I groused.

"Sorry, sir," the driver said, she was a private with 'Park' on her nametag. "It smelled like this when we picked it up from the motor pool."

"It smelled worse this morning." A soldier named Olafson said from the passenger seat. "We left the windows down to clear the smell out."

"Olafson, huh?" He was blond, about six feet five. "You always been this big, or has the Army been feeding you too much?"

"My mother was a good cook, sir."

"Uh huh." I wasn't good company, wasn't in the mood to be good company, so I stuck my nose into reports downloaded to my tablet, and the two soldiers in the front seats took the hint. The Agricultural Intelligence Office of UNEF HQ had prepared a series of reports for me, about the next area where we'd be planting crops; soil tests, climate, rainfall, groundwater, the types of crops the Ruhar had been growing there, and the chemicals they'd used. The fact that UNEF had quickly established an 'Agricultural Intelligence Office' spoke volumes about our uncomfortable situation on Paradise. I thought it had been a joke when I'd been assigned to plant the crops we needed to survive on Paradise; I had helped my parents with their small farm, but I was in no way an agricultural expert. It was amazing to me how much I'd learned in a short time. Fear of starvation is a great motivator. The place where we'd be planting crops looked to be about perfect, it was close enough to the equator that we might get two or three crops per year, had plenty of rainfall, and good groundwater for irrigation during the summer dry season. I checked the manifests of the trucks in our convoy, we were heavily loaded with soil conditioner, because the local dirt needed to be prepared before Earth organisms would grow well. When I'd read all I could understand about agriculture, I turned to the other reports UNEF expected me to read. Who knew being an officer involved so much reading? It was like being back in school. I hoped there wasn't a quiz tomorrow.