"I'm busting my ass to qualify for combat duty," Shauna explained. "Almost qualified when I signed up, I fell on an obstacle course and sprained my ACL with two weeks to go, pissed me off! So I went into logistics. I want combat duty, Joe."

Being in the infantry, and having been in combat, I wanted to caution her against too much enthusiasm. It wasn't any of my business how she wanted to serve, so I kept my mouth shut. We finished eating, people from her unit came over to talk to her, and then she left. If that could be considered a first date, it was a downer.

The first war game on Camp Alpha was Operation Valiant Shield. Code names for operations were ideally supposed to be selected at random, so as not to give the enemy an idea of your intent. Like 'Operation Desert Storm' was a cool name, but it had been pretty easy for the Iraqis to figure that op was an offensive in the desert. Not that it had mattered back then. The problem with random words is that you could end up with ops with unintentionally funny or lame names, like Flaming Bunny or Limp Justice, so really operation names were dreamed up, or at least vetted by, the UNEF PR staff. The name Valiant Shield was probably thought to be inspiring for the troops, when I heard the name all I could think was we were supposed to die valiantly. Like he old Roman saying, where a soldier was supposed to come with his shield, or on it.

I wish I could tell you that during our first war game, I dreamed up some incredibly brilliant tactic that no one else had thought of, and it led us, or at least my platoon, to victory. I could tell you that, and it would be an awesome story, right? Maybe I will tell something along those lines someday to my grandchildren, when they're complaining how uncool old Grandpa is. Or maybe I'll tell a story like that someday when I'm drunk and I think it'll get me laid. The truth, unfortunately, is that me, and everyone else in two platoons of our company, were declared dead from an orbital railgun strike, less than an hour after the war game started. We were hustling across a shallow canyon, going from cover to cover, when my zPhone beeped, and a squawking voice announced that I was dead. Then my zPhone stopped working entirely. Crap. How the hell was two platoons of foot soldiers worth a railgun strike? The company had split up to avoid providing a juicy target, and that didn't work.