"Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

treat it seriously, and not as just another training exercise. We do it to all of our human
soldiers, because it lets us turn out real, blooded troops without having to kill a
significant portion of them. But in your real world, it never happened."
"It never happened? Quincy and Zuzanna weren't real? They never died?"
"They were real. They are real. They were your fellow students in that portion of the
exercise. The only difference is that in the flanking counterattack, each of them thought
that all the others were killed, and that he or she was the only human survivor. Surviving
the emotional impact of being alive when your friends die is much of what makes a troop
seasoned."
"Damn you. God damn you straight to Hell!" It was all I could say.
"I can't go to Hell, Mickolai. I don't have a soul. I'm just a machine."
"Damn you anyway. Then the whole scene where Quincy stayed with his dead wife,
and Radek broke and ran, that was just a fake, too?"
"It happened in Dream World, if that's what you mean. It was as real as anything else
that happens here. Your emotions were real enough, and so were mine."
"Then what about the rest of it? The mine we hit, and the enemy division that was in
the valley there. That was all fake, too?"
"The mine was a standard exercise in the survival course, one that not every student
passes as well as you did. As to the rest, well, Mickolai, you did extremely well in your
training. Besides having a natural talent for functioning as an observer, you were
innovative, hard working, and self-sacrificing in battle. During that artillery barrage, not
every observer would have turned the defense of his own tank over to another while he
gave his full efforts to observing for Eva's X-ray laser."
"It was just the right thing to do at the time," I said.
"Oh, I agree. You made a sound tactical decision, but it was not one that every soldier
could have carried out. You increased the survival odds for your unit while lowering your
own chances of living. Your strange inner conflicts and contradictions make you a good
leader, Mickolai. During the flanking attack on the Serbians, you managed to keep three
very diverse and difficult people under your control. You spotted those low dirt mounds
where the Serbians had dug in, and understood their importance, something that not every
student did. And you fought your unit very efficiently, given the difficult circumstances."
"What about the unmanned enemy division?"
"That was another test, which you passed wonderfully. You had already shown your
leadership potential, and in taking that division you showed tremendous initiative.
Therefore, you were given the chance to try out for a command position, and you
graduated cum laude."
"You mean that I really am a general officer?"
"No. You are in the top one hundredth of one percent of the troops enlisting in our
forces. You are one trooper in ten thousand. But the usual general commands fifty to a
hundred thousand troops, Mickolai. You are close, but it would take a military disaster to
get your promotion through."
"That still puts me in range of being a colonel, doesn't it?"
"I'm afraid not. Being a good leader is different from being a good subordinate. The
skills required of a good colonel are different from the skills required of a good general.
In the category of being a staff officer, you don't even come close. Your wife is a fine
colonel, Mickolai, but you are not. With our computer-controlled command structure, the
dozens of layers of middle managers in the usual military structure are done away with.
There is only one general, five staff officers, and a lot of fighting men and machines."
"So I'm still a tanker." I put my head down on my arms.
"Yes, though you're a Tanker First Class. One of the very best."