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Description
The Bellafont WarForge/Hazzard Industries Mark VII Personal Combat Armor masses fifty kilos 'dry.'  That's just the armor; no helmet, weapons, ammo, or combat gear.  With a minimum feed from the power cells, the armor supports a quarter of it's own weight.
We run 10K in dry armor, no helmets, before the sun even comes up.
The Gunny is not satisfied.  So we run it again.
Kriemhild barks cadence, and we sing it back in a hoarse, brute chorus, four dozen strong.  We rolled out at 04:30, having slept only four hours.  It is now 07:00.  We have not yet earned our breakfast.
    I am sweating, aching, chaffing in places I'd rather not mention.  The cold mountain air burns my throat and sinus with every breath.  I am exhausted, strung out from lack of sleep.  We've had only the minimum three hours a night for the last week.  This morning's four hours was a rare and generous gift from The Gunny.  Now we're paying him back for it.
Running in the middle of the pack, I keep my head down and stay off his radar.   The Gunny runs sweep on the platoon, and ruthlessly chastizes stragglers.  We hate him bitterly, and worship the ground he walks on.
As we come up the gorge, The Gunny bellows from the rear and turns the pack up the face of a rockslide.  Immediately our progress suffers.  The splintered shale slides under our boots, ruining our balance and killing the pace.  The Gunny's verbal abuse is merciless.  We redouble the effort because none of us want to be caught at the rear, in range of his physical reprimand.
Ahead of me, Rex loses his footing completely and crashes down on his chest.  I can't help but wince in sympathy.  I'm sure that fall knocked the wind out of him.  I overtake him, grab him by the drag handle behind his shoulders and haul him to his feet again.  He scrambles, coughing.  Then he's up and running on his own again.  "Thanks, Axel."
"Save it."
We top the slide in a disgraceful mob, but form up again quickly.  I've lost some ground, I'm close enough to the rear to hear The Gunny's baton cracking against armor.  That's a goad I want to avoid at all cost.  It's not the pain I'm afraid of, because the armor will take the sting out of it.  It's the shame.
I have a headache; muscle cramps in my legs.  My shoulders, knees, and ribs - and other bits - feel raw.  I know I am filthy and I must stink like a latrine, but I don't register that anymore.
The sun is up now, and stretches our shadows out behind us.  We hit a level stretch and I put on a little speed to move up in the pack.  A squad of Special Forces meets us coming the other way.  Seven wiry specialists with side-shaved heads, and that killer combat stare in their eyes.  I wonder if they staged their run to meets us like this deliberately.  On the response, they sing back an obscene, degrading variation on our current cadence.
I resent them.  I hate them.  I would give everything to be the eighth man in their elite squad.  I regain the middle of the pack.  I settle into the pain and fatigue and headache, thirst and hunger.  I soak it up.
07:30 sees us back at the grinder.  We rank up tight and stand to.  The Gunny prowls through us like a hunting dog on the scent.
"Disgraceful bunch of rejects."  He doesn't have to raise his voice.  The grinder is dead silent.  "Sergeant, I think you've confused your platton with this filthy mob of rejects from General Infantry."  It is the lowest insult he could sling at us, and I feel the whole platoon bristle.  Of course there's nothing we can do about it.
He singles out Riker, four places down from me.  "Drop!"  Riker hits the deck.  "Beat your face!" The Gunny demands.  Riker begins a grueling round of pushups, in armor.
The Gunny moves on, picks a few more, and sets them to other punishments.  He seems to single them out at random, but they are without fail those individuals who fell behind during the run.
The Gunny takes his leave, storming off toward barracks without a word, leaving Kriemhild to turn us out.  All but those The Gunny is thrashing.  We jog to the armory and shed our suits.  With that weight lifted, I feel like I'll float away.
We are fed - grudgingly - back on the grinder.  Field rations; stale-tasting flash-dried pseudo food sealed in greasy foil pouches.  We don't care.  We bolt it down.
As if he magically knows, The Gunny stalks back just as we finish.  "Did you enjoy your breakfast, maggots?"
"Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!" is the thundering response.  We are staggering tired, filthy, and hurting.  Fed, but hardly sated by that pitiful snack.  But we're damned if we'll show an inch of weakness to The Gunny.
"I'm so glad to hear it!" bitter sarcasm.  "Now since you layabouts haven't wasted the whole morning with your little sight-seeing tour, we can get on to the main event!"

In ten minutes we are back in armor, but this time we have helmets, rifles, and dead loads - forty kilos of sandbag weights meant to simulate ammunition and combat gear.  We crawl the course under barrage.  Flash grenades keep us half blind, half deaf, and disoriented.  Tracers rake the air above our heads.  A cadre of instructors screams conflicting nonsense at us.  The wire catches our armor and gear and slows us down.  Someone gets hopelessly tangled and has to be cut free.
Through it all Kriemhild's alert whistle is our guiding force.  We crawl to him.
After that, we charge down to the beach for a sand run, still in weighted kit and armor.  It's like running in a dream, you try as hard as you can and you only get slower and slower.
So you try harder.
I hurt so bad all over I forget about it.  There's a flavor in my nose and throat like blood.  The suit's filters feed my own animal stink back to me with every breath.  My field of vision is a tunnel through the scratch-crazed visor.
We are ordered into the surf, right up to our necks.  I am once again reminded that my suit has faulty seals.  Icy seawater trickles down my neck and back.  I wonder vaguely who wore this suit before me.  If they made it through this miserable training, or begged off.  I promise myself I will not quit.  I would rather drown right here.
Some of us do quit.  We've shed bodies all along, and drop five more here in the frigid waves.  They abandon the water before the command is given and admit defeat.  I am disgusted and disappointed – as much as I can be bothered to spare the attention.
We run the armor dry, and are eventually fed a second round of awful field rations, which disappears in half the time.  I am still aching hungry.  The Gunny marches us up past the range to The Copse and we execute log drills.  Then we run the short loop, up past the cemetery.  We get a short rest.  Most of us snatch a few minutes of sleep.
After that we hit the long loop, up through the foothills.  I dread the idea of tackling that rockslide again.  Not this tired and weighed down.  But we veer off on the service road that loops back to one of the satelite bases.  This one is known as The Reach.  Don't ask me why.  It tucks up against the foothills near the begining of the forest.
Here we crawl a different course; wire, pit-traps, and obstacles.  Half of it is under swamp.  I think the instructors hope to murder a few of us, making us crawl swamp in armor.
Somewhere in the middle of this trial I black out.  Probably from sheer exhaustion.  I only come aware again upon being dragged bodily from the sucking, blood-warm ooze.  My helmet is half full of murky water.
A medic checks the readouts on my armor, which means it's worse than I thought.
I unclamp the helmet and drag it off to vomit stagnant water.  "How long...?"
"Sixteen minutes."
"Am I good?"  I have to ask, because I likely wouldn't notice if I were missing limbs at this point.
"You're good."
I lock the helmet in place and crawl back into the mud.  I have sixteen minutes to make up.

The sun goes down, it starts to rain.  We hardly notice.  The rain washes the mud from our armor.
We run.  We drill.  We crawl.  We are permitted to eat.  We are permitted to sleep – sitting back to back with a battle-buddy – for two hours.
We are issued with chalk-tipped rounds for our rifles and put through sweep-and-clear war games in the predawn hours.  Beyond drills, this is one, long, running firefight with our 'enemy,' through prefab structures on the outlying Reach station.
Simulated 'kills' are toted up at the end by chalk marks.  Anyone with chalk on his armor is subjected to PT thrashing. I have two.
Back to the beach, into the cold surf.  This time, we go in deep enough to be completely submerged.  Twelve-degree breakers rolling over my head, I curse my faulty armor, and fight panic.  We lose two more to that, a soldier's worst enemy.
We are called out again well before the leaks put me in danger of drowning, but I'm shuddering cold.  In an empty barracks, we are given brief respite; we get to shed armor for the first time in too long.  This is so the armorers can check the suits, make sure they are still functioning within acceptable limits.  And so the medics can do the same for us.  At this point we have among us two sprained ankles, a dislocated shoulder, and one man suffering early stages of hypothermia.
I myself am barely alert enough to put on a dry uniform and drink the warm broth they hand out, before collapsing for two hours sleep.  We sleep on the floor in a miserable pile, but at least we are warm.  This will not last.
For the next few days we are pushed beyond all limits.  Our numbers drop drastically; by the third day we are down by nearly half.  Two more drop out on day four, but only because of injuries which could  permenantly cripple them if they continue.
By the fifth day I have long since lost track of days.  I am functioning in animal survival mode.  I do not hurt, I do not hunger, I do not thirst.  I eat when I am told to eat, and sleep when I am allowed.  I am a machine.  I am killer instinct wrapped in armor.  I am a walking weapon.  The instructors point me and the rest of the platoon to our task and turn us loose.
Dimly I know we have never performed so well.  The 'fat' has been trimmed from our ranks.    We are worn down to the razor's edge - there is none of the excess energy necessary to feed bravdo, politics, or complaint.  We operate in perfect unison.  We run the urban wargames again in a fraction of the time.  No one has chalk on his armor at the end.  We do relays in and out of the cold ocean waves.  At some point I am lucid enough to recognize the instructor of our current trial as one of the Special Forces operatives we encountered days before on our morning run.  He is slightly shorter than me, lean as a whip, nothing but muscle.  He is unarmored and unarmed, but I think he could put me down, and probably kill me, barehanded as he is.
He snarls like a wild thing, facing up to two dozen troopers in full battle armor; taunting us, insulting us, goading us on.  Nothing is sacred.  Our mothers are whores and sluts, our fathers are degenerate, gelded scum.  We are degenerate gelded scum, bitches, and maggots, and filth; not worthy for GI, let alone his noble company.
Following one particularly colorful and imaginative insult, someone fires back; "And your mother loved it!"  I think it's Riker; I am surprized and deeply impressed she is still in this.  In answer, the SF sergeant barks a laugh that puts chills up my spine.
Later that night we get the command to "Kick on!" and we fire up our armor properly.  The servos finally take the mass of the suit, and I feel weightless and powerful.  Our visors light up with head-up displays and IFF beacons.  We are ordered into 'melee' close-combat; compact rifles  – with chalk-tipped loads – and the bayonet claws built into the gauntlets of our armor.  We run a course of dummy targets, slashing with claws and laying down 'double-tap' killshots.  By then I am back in the blur.  I remember almost nothing.

I don't know what day it is.  We are back on the grinder, in tight ranks.  The sun rises from the ocean before us.  The morning is crisp and clear.  I have the sour, dehydrated ache that comes of a bad night's sleep in the cold.
The Gunny stands with his back to us, watching the sunrise.  He smokes a cigar.  I have not eaten since the night before, and normally that smell on an empty stomach would make me nauseous.  I feel nothing.
"Fine morning, maggots," he says conversationally.
"Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!"
He turns to face our formation.  "Smell that?" pointing toward the barracks with his cigar.  I smell nothing but my own reek, and I stopped noticing that at least a week ago.  "That's breakfast cooking.  Steak and eggs, beans, fried bread, plenty of coffee.  Enough to make a man hungry.  Are you men hungry?"  He has called us men, and that is always a red flag.  We are not men, we are maggots.
"No, Gunnery Sergeant!"
"I asked you a question!  Are you miserable sacks of shit hungry?!"  He can project his voice across the entire base and still not sound like he's straining.
"No, Gunnery Sergeant!"  There are only twenty-two of us left, but if anything the chorus sounds louder, stronger.
"I didn't think so.  Are you tired?!"
"No, Gunnery Sergeant!"
"Of course not.  Does every inch of you hurt?!"
"No, Gunnery Sergeant."
"You're damn right!  You know why?
"Because you are the leanest, meanest weapon of mankind in system.  You will not hunger, hurt, or sleep until the battle is done.  The hardest enemies of peace and equity break in fear when they meet you on the field.  They balk at the mention of your name.  You defend those weaker, and persecute oppression, dischord, and injustice.
"You are never alone.  You are among the finest men and women of the Union.  You will neither fall, nor fail, but that another will step up in your place.
"You fight like the fury of Hell!
"Your ranks may be few, but your membership is proud."
The grinder is silent.
The Gunny delivers the 'punchline;' the simple phrase that validates every misery we have endured, and which ultimately releases us.  "Marines!  You are secure!"
Only then does it fully sink in what we have done, and what the last weeks have been.  The Guantlet - the stuff of legend.  The final test.   The worst and meanest trial short of Special Forces itself.
We have run The Gauntlet.  We are now Union Marines.

Description
The Bellafont WarForge/Hazzard Industries Mark VII Personal Combat Armor masses fifty kilos 'dry.'  That's just the armor; no helmet, weapons, ammo, or combat gear.  With a minimum feed from the power cells, the armor supports a quarter of it's own weight.
We run 10K in dry armor, no helmets, before the sun even comes up.
The Gunny is not satisfied.  So we run it again.
Kriemhild barks cadence, and we sing it back in a hoarse, brute chorus, four dozen strong.  We rolled out at 04:30, having slept only four hours.  It is now 07:00.  We have not yet earned our breakfast.
    I am sweating, aching, chaffing in places I'd rather not mention.  The cold mountain air burns my throat and sinus with every breath.  I am exhausted, strung out from lack of sleep.  We've had only the minimum three hours a night for the last week.  This morning's four hours was a rare and generous gift from The Gunny.  Now we're paying him back for it.
Running in the middle of the pack, I keep my head down and stay off his radar.   The Gunny runs sweep on the platoon, and ruthlessly chastizes stragglers.  We hate him bitterly, and worship the ground he walks on.
As we come up the gorge, The Gunny bellows from the rear and turns the pack up the face of a rockslide.  Immediately our progress suffers.  The splintered shale slides under our boots, ruining our balance and killing the pace.  The Gunny's verbal abuse is merciless.  We redouble the effort because none of us want to be caught at the rear, in range of his physical reprimand.
Ahead of me, Rex loses his footing completely and crashes down on his chest.  I can't help but wince in sympathy.  I'm sure that fall knocked the wind out of him.  I overtake him, grab him by the drag handle behind his shoulders and haul him to his feet again.  He scrambles, coughing.  Then he's up and running on his own again.  "Thanks, Axel."
"Save it."
We top the slide in a disgraceful mob, but form up again quickly.  I've lost some ground, I'm close enough to the rear to hear The Gunny's baton cracking against armor.  That's a goad I want to avoid at all cost.  It's not the pain I'm afraid of, because the armor will take the sting out of it.  It's the shame.
I have a headache; muscle cramps in my legs.  My shoulders, knees, and ribs - and other bits - feel raw.  I know I am filthy and I must stink like a latrine, but I don't register that anymore.
The sun is up now, and stretches our shadows out behind us.  We hit a level stretch and I put on a little speed to move up in the pack.  A squad of Special Forces meets us coming the other way.  Seven wiry specialists with side-shaved heads, and that killer combat stare in their eyes.  I wonder if they staged their run to meets us like this deliberately.  On the response, they sing back an obscene, degrading variation on our current cadence.
I resent them.  I hate them.  I would give everything to be the eighth man in their elite squad.  I regain the middle of the pack.  I settle into the pain and fatigue and headache, thirst and hunger.  I soak it up.
07:30 sees us back at the grinder.  We rank up tight and stand to.  The Gunny prowls through us like a hunting dog on the scent.
"Disgraceful bunch of rejects."  He doesn't have to raise his voice.  The grinder is dead silent.  "Sergeant, I think you've confused your platton with this filthy mob of rejects from General Infantry."  It is the lowest insult he could sling at us, and I feel the whole platoon bristle.  Of course there's nothing we can do about it.
He singles out Riker, four places down from me.  "Drop!"  Riker hits the deck.  "Beat your face!" The Gunny demands.  Riker begins a grueling round of pushups, in armor.
The Gunny moves on, picks a few more, and sets them to other punishments.  He seems to single them out at random, but they are without fail those individuals who fell behind during the run.
The Gunny takes his leave, storming off toward barracks without a word, leaving Kriemhild to turn us out.  All but those The Gunny is thrashing.  We jog to the armory and shed our suits.  With that weight lifted, I feel like I'll float away.
We are fed - grudgingly - back on the grinder.  Field rations; stale-tasting flash-dried pseudo food sealed in greasy foil pouches.  We don't care.  We bolt it down.
As if he magically knows, The Gunny stalks back just as we finish.  "Did you enjoy your breakfast, maggots?"
"Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!" is the thundering response.  We are staggering tired, filthy, and hurting.  Fed, but hardly sated by that pitiful snack.  But we're damned if we'll show an inch of weakness to The Gunny.
"I'm so glad to hear it!" bitter sarcasm.  "Now since you layabouts haven't wasted the whole morning with your little sight-seeing tour, we can get on to the main event!"

In ten minutes we are back in armor, but this time we have helmets, rifles, and dead loads - forty kilos of sandbag weights meant to simulate ammunition and combat gear.  We crawl the course under barrage.  Flash grenades keep us half blind, half deaf, and disoriented.  Tracers rake the air above our heads.  A cadre of instructors screams conflicting nonsense at us.  The wire catches our armor and gear and slows us down.  Someone gets hopelessly tangled and has to be cut free.
Through it all Kriemhild's alert whistle is our guiding force.  We crawl to him.
After that, we charge down to the beach for a sand run, still in weighted kit and armor.  It's like running in a dream, you try as hard as you can and you only get slower and slower.
So you try harder.
I hurt so bad all over I forget about it.  There's a flavor in my nose and throat like blood.  The suit's filters feed my own animal stink back to me with every breath.  My field of vision is a tunnel through the scratch-crazed visor.
We are ordered into the surf, right up to our necks.  I am once again reminded that my suit has faulty seals.  Icy seawater trickles down my neck and back.  I wonder vaguely who wore this suit before me.  If they made it through this miserable training, or begged off.  I promise myself I will not quit.  I would rather drown right here.
Some of us do quit.  We've shed bodies all along, and drop five more here in the frigid waves.  They abandon the water before the command is given and admit defeat.  I am disgusted and disappointed – as much as I can be bothered to spare the attention.
We run the armor dry, and are eventually fed a second round of awful field rations, which disappears in half the time.  I am still aching hungry.  The Gunny marches us up past the range to The Copse and we execute log drills.  Then we run the short loop, up past the cemetery.  We get a short rest.  Most of us snatch a few minutes of sleep.
After that we hit the long loop, up through the foothills.  I dread the idea of tackling that rockslide again.  Not this tired and weighed down.  But we veer off on the service road that loops back to one of the satelite bases.  This one is known as The Reach.  Don't ask me why.  It tucks up against the foothills near the begining of the forest.
Here we crawl a different course; wire, pit-traps, and obstacles.  Half of it is under swamp.  I think the instructors hope to murder a few of us, making us crawl swamp in armor.
Somewhere in the middle of this trial I black out.  Probably from sheer exhaustion.  I only come aware again upon being dragged bodily from the sucking, blood-warm ooze.  My helmet is half full of murky water.
A medic checks the readouts on my armor, which means it's worse than I thought.
I unclamp the helmet and drag it off to vomit stagnant water.  "How long...?"
"Sixteen minutes."
"Am I good?"  I have to ask, because I likely wouldn't notice if I were missing limbs at this point.
"You're good."
I lock the helmet in place and crawl back into the mud.  I have sixteen minutes to make up.

The sun goes down, it starts to rain.  We hardly notice.  The rain washes the mud from our armor.
We run.  We drill.  We crawl.  We are permitted to eat.  We are permitted to sleep – sitting back to back with a battle-buddy – for two hours.
We are issued with chalk-tipped rounds for our rifles and put through sweep-and-clear war games in the predawn hours.  Beyond drills, this is one, long, running firefight with our 'enemy,' through prefab structures on the outlying Reach station.
Simulated 'kills' are toted up at the end by chalk marks.  Anyone with chalk on his armor is subjected to PT thrashing. I have two.
Back to the beach, into the cold surf.  This time, we go in deep enough to be completely submerged.  Twelve-degree breakers rolling over my head, I curse my faulty armor, and fight panic.  We lose two more to that, a soldier's worst enemy.
We are called out again well before the leaks put me in danger of drowning, but I'm shuddering cold.  In an empty barracks, we are given brief respite; we get to shed armor for the first time in too long.  This is so the armorers can check the suits, make sure they are still functioning within acceptable limits.  And so the medics can do the same for us.  At this point we have among us two sprained ankles, a dislocated shoulder, and one man suffering early stages of hypothermia.
I myself am barely alert enough to put on a dry uniform and drink the warm broth they hand out, before collapsing for two hours sleep.  We sleep on the floor in a miserable pile, but at least we are warm.  This will not last.
For the next few days we are pushed beyond all limits.  Our numbers drop drastically; by the third day we are down by nearly half.  Two more drop out on day four, but only because of injuries which could  permenantly cripple them if they continue.
By the fifth day I have long since lost track of days.  I am functioning in animal survival mode.  I do not hurt, I do not hunger, I do not thirst.  I eat when I am told to eat, and sleep when I am allowed.  I am a machine.  I am killer instinct wrapped in armor.  I am a walking weapon.  The instructors point me and the rest of the platoon to our task and turn us loose.
Dimly I know we have never performed so well.  The 'fat' has been trimmed from our ranks.    We are worn down to the razor's edge - there is none of the excess energy necessary to feed bravdo, politics, or complaint.  We operate in perfect unison.  We run the urban wargames again in a fraction of the time.  No one has chalk on his armor at the end.  We do relays in and out of the cold ocean waves.  At some point I am lucid enough to recognize the instructor of our current trial as one of the Special Forces operatives we encountered days before on our morning run.  He is slightly shorter than me, lean as a whip, nothing but muscle.  He is unarmored and unarmed, but I think he could put me down, and probably kill me, barehanded as he is.
He snarls like a wild thing, facing up to two dozen troopers in full battle armor; taunting us, insulting us, goading us on.  Nothing is sacred.  Our mothers are whores and sluts, our fathers are degenerate, gelded scum.  We are degenerate gelded scum, bitches, and maggots, and filth; not worthy for GI, let alone his noble company.
Following one particularly colorful and imaginative insult, someone fires back; "And your mother loved it!"  I think it's Riker; I am surprized and deeply impressed she is still in this.  In answer, the SF sergeant barks a laugh that puts chills up my spine.
Later that night we get the command to "Kick on!" and we fire up our armor properly.  The servos finally take the mass of the suit, and I feel weightless and powerful.  Our visors light up with head-up displays and IFF beacons.  We are ordered into 'melee' close-combat; compact rifles  – with chalk-tipped loads – and the bayonet claws built into the gauntlets of our armor.  We run a course of dummy targets, slashing with claws and laying down 'double-tap' killshots.  By then I am back in the blur.  I remember almost nothing.

I don't know what day it is.  We are back on the grinder, in tight ranks.  The sun rises from the ocean before us.  The morning is crisp and clear.  I have the sour, dehydrated ache that comes of a bad night's sleep in the cold.
The Gunny stands with his back to us, watching the sunrise.  He smokes a cigar.  I have not eaten since the night before, and normally that smell on an empty stomach would make me nauseous.  I feel nothing.
"Fine morning, maggots," he says conversationally.
"Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!"
He turns to face our formation.  "Smell that?" pointing toward the barracks with his cigar.  I smell nothing but my own reek, and I stopped noticing that at least a week ago.  "That's breakfast cooking.  Steak and eggs, beans, fried bread, plenty of coffee.  Enough to make a man hungry.  Are you men hungry?"  He has called us men, and that is always a red flag.  We are not men, we are maggots.
"No, Gunnery Sergeant!"
"I asked you a question!  Are you miserable sacks of shit hungry?!"  He can project his voice across the entire base and still not sound like he's straining.
"No, Gunnery Sergeant!"  There are only twenty-two of us left, but if anything the chorus sounds louder, stronger.
"I didn't think so.  Are you tired?!"
"No, Gunnery Sergeant!"
"Of course not.  Does every inch of you hurt?!"
"No, Gunnery Sergeant."
"You're damn right!  You know why?
"Because you are the leanest, meanest weapon of mankind in system.  You will not hunger, hurt, or sleep until the battle is done.  The hardest enemies of peace and equity break in fear when they meet you on the field.  They balk at the mention of your name.  You defend those weaker, and persecute oppression, dischord, and injustice.
"You are never alone.  You are among the finest men and women of the Union.  You will neither fall, nor fail, but that another will step up in your place.
"You fight like the fury of Hell!
"Your ranks may be few, but your membership is proud."
The grinder is silent.
The Gunny delivers the 'punchline;' the simple phrase that validates every misery we have endured, and which ultimately releases us.  "Marines!  You are secure!"
Only then does it fully sink in what we have done, and what the last weeks have been.  The Guantlet - the stuff of legend.  The final test.   The worst and meanest trial short of Special Forces itself.
We have run The Gauntlet.  We are now Union Marines.