There were three of us left. Three, 3, tres, drei, troi, THREE. That's how brutal selection was. Out of the fifty men that started selection in our group, 23 were dead, 24 had quit, and there were only three of us left. The other group must have had it easy, they had four guys left. To this day, I don't know how we made it through, it was simply the most grueling experience I'd ever been through. I've heard that if you debate quitting during selection for other elite groups, like the SEALs and shit, your mind will eventually decide that quitting is worth it. In ours, quitting didn't necessarily mean survival, and everyone was debating it constantly.
Anyways, the three of us were sitting in the infirmary a few days after selection, and HM walked up to us and handed us each our first paycheck. I'd never made that much in a year, and I'd only been in PBE for six months at the time.
"That's for making it through. Once you actually start work, that will get bigger, and once you start learning something usefull, it will keep getting bigger. I pay for what I want, and I get what I pay for. Remember that, it will benefit you...or cost you dearly."
I was only in the infirmary for a week, and then I was taught to shoot, move, and communicate. I made the mistake of remarking to the cadre that I was a pilot, not a shooter only once. Within ten minutes, a crate of 2,000 rounds of ammunition was sitting next to me, unboxed, and the cadre informed me that I was to shoot, move, and communicate until it was all gone, even if I was shooting, moving, and communicating alone and in the darkness. That's just how PBE works, though. Every mistake is punished by more training, and in our fashion, you never forget the lesson. Things that start as punishment become muscle memory.
I finally got an aircraft three months after selection was over. It was, for lack of a better term, a flying junkyard. Well, slightly worse than that, the thing was a antique flying junkyard. I shit you not, it was an An-2, a single-engine biplane that was built in the 1960s. HM told me that it was going to be our jump and transport bird for the shooters, and I remarked that he must have stolen it from a skydiving company.
"Well, something like that. You can make this work, right?"
HM's questions were always meant to be answered in the affirmative. He never gave anyone with less than several years in the company what they actually asked for, he'd always give them not quite enough. No one asked why, we all kinda knew the answer. HM believed that everything was training, either good habits or bad habits, and "making do with what ya got" is a good way to instill good habits.
It was a full six months after selection until we got our first contract. Fuck if I ever figured out how we were being funded during that time. We were doing something related to training six days a week, with not a single week off. It had to have cost a small fortune, but by the end of it, we were pushing the limits of human capability. I never caught a fly with chopsticks, but inside my cockpit, I could literally push any button I needed to with my eyes closed, and I could fly the plane with fireworks going off on the copilot's seat.
By the way, HM thought that one was fucking hilarious. I was supposed to spend the day giving lifts to a group of jump troopers, but right as I started the takeoff roll on the third round, someone pushed a button, and a remote set off one of those 16,000-count rolls of ladyfingers. Those things went off for ten full minutes, smoke filled the entire plane, my eyes were watering so bad I could barely see, I had numerous minor burns, and my ears rang for days, and the things I said on the radio once I was airborne earned me my very first fine for an FCC violation.
One day, HM called everyone in to the theater we used as a briefing room. There were 26 of us now, none of whom had done anything since selection and basic training [i]but[/i] various types of training. We were ready to do something real, to actually get to work.
"Gentlemen," he said. "It's time to earn your keep. I'm sure you've all been wondering how and when we're going to start doing jobs, and the answer is Arizona. Shit's gotten so bad down there that we think they'll look the other way if we move in and quietly clean the place up Wild West-style, so that's exactly what we're going to do. We are going to set up small FOBs on the border, we are going to kill everything that comes across, and we are going to take anything and everything that glitters in the sunlight as we do this."
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