God's Dogs Book 2
Chapter 5

I think that being a soul in flesh is really challenging and we should all give ourselves more credit.

S. Kelley Harrell

Setting up the ambush the next day gave Moss a chance to challenge the pair of boys he was interested in.

Moss appeared in front of the pair as they were preparing a hide for the ambush.

“Why are you doing such violence to these alders?” Moss inquired.

The boys startled. Then they stepped away from the cut alders. One said in reply, “We’re clearing this depression so one of us can hide in there, Coyote Moss.”

“Anyone who knows how alders grow, or who can read a disturbance in the qi-field would not be fooled. Stand out here and see how unnatural that cut looks.”

They did, and it did. The boys looked chagrined but didn’t get defensive. Moss saw that as a good sign.

“Manuel, clean up that mess, and apologize to the guardian,” Moss ordered one of the boys.

“The guardian?”

“All of these patches of growth have spirit guardians,” Moss said with some irritation. “Where did you grow up? In a city?”

The lanky, dark-skinned youth snickered. “No, Coyote Moss, it was a ranch. I tended horses and wrangled livestock. We didn’t have much to do with plants, and trees, and such.”

“And you, Joseph?”

The black youth nodded his head. “Me, too, Coyote Moss.”

“Fine. Stand there and connect to the qi-field the way we taught you,” Moss directed. Then he let his awareness reach out to the spirit guardian of this patch of alders. It was an elemental spirit, one that shunned contact with humans and was content with balancing the qi of this stand of alders it cared for. It was also pissed at the humans who made a mess of it.

Moss coaxed it forward with the reward of expressing its anger at the boys.

“Open your eyes half-way and leave your eyes unfocused,” Moss told the boys.

The guardian shimmered into their view. It was gnome-like in appearance – small, squat body with a leafy cloak. The boys felt its words more than heard them.

“You are clumsy, vile, destructive oafs,” it sent. “You killed my two-year-old children. I will haunt your lives while you are in my woods.”

“We didn’t know,” Manuel lamented.

“Ignorant as well! I will make your lesson as painful as I can, smelly human.”

“We will clean it, master guardian,” Joseph tried. “We will fix it if you tell us how. We apologize for our ignorance.”

Moss drifted off, content that the boys were connecting to the living world they had finally chosen to inhabit rather than visit occasionally. The ‘reality’ on the Nature plateau of existence was a rich and lively world of guardians, sprites, nymphs, and other spirit-creatures that most humans only knew as myth or legend. For Coyotes, they were entities to befriend.

The ambush exercise went well, which occurred the next day. Red Platoon force-marched to the site with the objective of taking the ground Blue Platoon held. Blue platoon deployed in a simple encirclement formation, dug into camouflaged positions, and waited for Red Platoon to enter the killing ground. They fought into the night.

The fighting, after the ambush triggered, gave the instructors a good read on how the remaining recruits handled, or would handle, the chaos and fog of war. The fight, flight, or freeze response, when the sympathetic nervous system triggered into survival, was hard-wired. People defaulted into one or another response. Sometimes in military circles it was referred to as ‘good adrenaline’ or ‘bad adrenaline.’ People who were hard-wired for an initial fight response could be counted on, for the most part, to perform well in combat. Other factors were involved, though, as the fight response could devolve into flight or freeze based on those factors, but having the fight response trigger first was a good indication on whether or not a recruit was trainable for combat.

The next morning, with hardly any sleep, they all marched back to base. After cleaning up, they continued with weapons training. As that progressed, the D.I.s took turns in Gomez’ office writing up evaluations on their troops.

The Coyotes also took turns with the weapons training and the evaluations. Both Moss’ and River’s trainees received good evaluations.

The following day, Red Platoon headed out to set their ambush at a different location, and Blue Platoon continued with weapons training. Quinn and Pax identified their own recruits that showed promise and challenged them to ‘walk in two worlds’ more effectively.

That ease with connecting to the qi-field was what Quinn identified as problematic. It was a shift in perspective – like a figure-ground picture – looked at one way, the picture showed a chalice; looked at another way, it was two people talking face to face. Shifting from ‘normal’ reality to ‘nature’ reality on demand was a difficult ability to gain, but it was, as Quinn said, pivotal to success in Coyote training.

Week 5 was the next evolution of the recruits’ training. After the end of week 4, another dozen recruits dropped on request, and at least another dozen were wavering. The task in week 5 was 24/7 capture the flag. To make the game interesting, recruits that were hit by laser fire were stunned and available for capture, or they could be left as wounded. The stun lasted only ten minutes. If they were captured rather than left as wounded, they were disarmed and led to a holding area. A team member could free their comrades from captivity, and they could regain their rifles at the entrance of the holding area. However, once the armor sensed a second laser strike in a lethal area, then the recruit was considered ‘dead.’ But they all ‘resurrected’ at midnight.

The objective of the game was simply to capture the opponent’s flag and return it to one’s base – where their own flag was kept. The other rules were simple: do whatever it took to win. So, in that sense, it was a free-for-all. However, it did give each platoon the opportunity to devise strategies, create ambushes, and so on. The platoon sergeants did offer help with formulating those strategies – mainly by shooting down the ones that wouldn’t work.

In Red Platoon, Quinn told the dwindling number of recruits, “Sun Tzu said, ‘Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.’ If you start with that in mind, you can come up with a suitable strategy.”

“How does that help?” one boy in the back mumbled.

Another boy, closer to the front, replied, “We plan for a good defense around our base, using as few as we can, and come up with some kind of attack they don’t expect.”

“Snipers,” another boy offered. “If we use snipers, we won’t need to leave as many people guarding the base.”

A different boy took up the idea, “And if we use our sneaky scouts to find out where their base is, we can make a run for it.”

“While the rest of us meet their forces head on.”

“But not too far from base, in case they do the same and try to sneak around us.”

Quinn glanced at Sergeant Dayo Blessing, and she offered a slight grin back. They were learning.

How the sergeants and the Coyotes kept the game going throughout the next few days was to prompt a force that was on the verge of losing on what to do to escape their fate. Even so, during the week the DORs piled up. By the end of the week there were only thirteen recruits remaining, and no one won the game of capture the flag. That was its own lesson about ‘letting go of outcomes.’ With no winner, there were no bragging rights, which prompted the inevitable questions, ‘What did we do it for? What was the point?’ And since the very idea of ‘letting go of outcomes’ was the point, the ones that found that unacceptable dropped on request.

The final week was testing them on what they had been trained in. It was also the last chance for the sergeants to push the troops up to their self-imposed limits, and then a bit beyond. They relied on the Coyotes to make many of those calls, because the point was for the recruit to identify, through rigorous self-reflection, whether or not they had what it took to continue. Four more dropped on request.

Nine, then, graduated: four women, five men. Eight of them were ones the Coyotes identified in week 4. The graduation was simple, since there were so few of them. They lined up abreast in front of their instructors, and Quinn awarded them with a simple badge they could now wear on their uniforms. It was circular in shape with a silhouette of a coyote sky-lined on a landscape. Around the circumference were the words: wisdom, courage, faith. The nine of them were in militia dress uniforms, which now sported the single stripe of private. They saluted Quinn as they received their badge, and he nodded his head in return.

The badges would travel with them as they progressed through the Coyote program. At the end of the first year, the script and the edge of the circle of the badge changed to red, and they were promoted to PFC; at the end of the second year, the color change was orange, and the promotion was to corporal; at the end of the third year, the color change was green, and the promotion was to sergeant; at the end of the fourth year, the color change was blue, and the promotion was to staff sergeant. At the end of the fifth year, the color change was violet, and the promotion was to sergeant first class. The sixth year was a year of shadowing an existent Coyote team because their training was complete. Even so, there were DORs during that year as well. When the expected 90% of this year’s cadets washed out, they would join a militia unit proudly displaying the badge and rank they had won as Coyote candidates.

Master Sergeant Gomez concluded the brief ceremony this morning by saying, “You now have two weeks leave. What you will find is that you’ve changed, but the world you came from didn’t. Fitting back into the world you came from will be hard if not impossible. Don’t let it bother you too much. Change, after all, is the universal constant. Instead, welcome it, be amazed or even amused by it, and prepare yourselves mentally for what lies ahead.”

“On that,” River interjected, “you can expect a year of the same. You will be run ragged. You’ll spend much more time in the woods. Keep working on your connection to the qi-field. It will make things easier.”

Gomez paused for a moment before saying, “Sergeant First Class Washington, please dismiss the graduates.”

Washington spoke, “Detail, attention! Dismissed.”

Back at Coyote central, which the team had begun calling it, they met up with Master Lu the following day.

After they were seated in the comfy alcove, he asked, “How did it go?”

Quinn answered, “It was a good assignment. We brought a perspective that the NCOs appreciated, and we worked together well. I think we should be supplying a team to each of the regional boot camps in the future.”

Lu smiled and said, “Good. I like it when a plan works out how I think it should.”

The team chuckled at that.

“Now, onto your next assignment as the opposing force for the militia. That begins next week, so you have the rest of this week to finish burning the rust off. Then you’re to be the OpFor for three different battalions over the next month or so. Two are from off-world, and one is a new Penglai battalion that is just coming online. I expect you to give them all a difficult time.”

“Okay,” Quinn said and stood. “We’ll be ready.”

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