Countdown: H Hour by Tom Kratman

whispering, ‘Go on, see what pushing that red button does.’ ”
    “Oh,” said Pierantoni, “a relation of Murphy’s.”
    “Distantly related, yes,” Kiertzner said, “but they have different functions in the Divine Order. Murphy just fucks you. The emperor grows your dick so you fuck yourself. And one of the problems with the emperor is that perhaps one time in twenty his advice is sound. Which is, as it turns out, just enough for young troops to keep taking his advice.”
    “Ah. I can see that.”
    “Okay,” agreed Warrington, “but what do we do?”
    “Easy, sir. Major Stocker tells his people to ignore our rules; because the”—Pierantoni added the quotes through tone of voice and bracing his neck—“ ‘Guyanans are real soldiers and us Second Battalion pukes are not.’ We sit hard on our people to keep their overactive mouths shut and to minimize any differences.”
    Both the officers looked at him as if he were either crazy or stupid.
    “Then you brilliant bastards come up with something better. That’s what you get the big bucks for.”

    Way back in the dim mists of antiquity, when he’d first been thinking of going either U.S. Army Special Forces or to OCS, before eventually doing both, then Sergeant Warrington had had a company commander who had taken an interest in him, enough so to snag him as a driver, and use the opportunity to explain to him how to be a company commander. This included how to do nonjudicial punishment. Since the Corporation had adopted over U.S. military law pretty much in toto, the advice still held good.
    That long-ago commander had given a number of rules, or guidelines. “Rule One: Nonjudicial punishment should be very rare, indeed. Most problems can and should be handled well before it gets to you. If you find you’re having regular NJP sessions, there is something wrong with your command.
    “Rule Two: Take the time to plan the event. That means write out the script and rehearse it, if only in your mind. If you’re a decent human being, it’s hard to be a bastard. Rehearsal helps.
    “Rule Three: Use it as an opportunity to build your chain of command. Get input from the squad leader, platoon sergeant, and platoon leader. Ask the question: ‘Is this soldier salvageable?’
    “Rule Four: Always max out the guilty bastard, but then suspend any punishment you think is excessive, or likely to do more harm than good. Taking money or rank or both from a married man hurts his family, something you ought not want to do, if it’s at all avoidable. Restricting him to the barracks hurts him, in fact, gives him a serious—possibly terminal—case of lackanookie. Tie that in to the recommendations from his chain of command. Remember, too; suspended punishment reduces the probability of appeal.
    “Finally, Rule Five—and I cannot emphasize this enough: Always, always, always add to the punishment, ‘ and an oral reprimand .’ Once you invoke those words, you can give an ass chewing so abusive that it would get you court-martialed in other circumstances. There is no practical limit in what you can say and how you can say it, because you will have invoked the magic words. This also tends to partially cover up your excessively kind and generous nature in suspending a goodly portion of the more material punishment. That said, sometimes you will want to do the oral reprimand first. And, in any case, remember that a commander is always on stage.”
    Having somewhat skirted Rule Four, insofar as he lacked the legal authority to reduce Hallinan’s rank—and didn’t want to anyway; Warrington was on Rule Five at the moment: “ And an oral reprimand.”

    Warrington began conversationally. “Just out of curiosity, Sergeant Hallinan, were you sleeping during the classes at SWC”—that was the U.S. Army’s Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, NC—“when they lectured you on the delicate nature of dealing with local forces and their chains of command?”
    “Ummm,