GI Bill Benefits
(This story is set in a world where legalized, non-hereditary slavery is commonplace for serious crime, unredeemed debt, or voluntary self-indenture.
All characters who are enslaved or have any intimate/sexual contact with slaves are 18 years of age or older
. This is fiction; no one should ever be deprived of free will nor used sexually without his or her uncoerced permission.)
(Please Note: the
REAL LIFE J.R.
(or rather ONE of the real life J.R.s; my favorite was Sergeant First Class J. R. Sanders who served two tours in Vietnam as a 12B combat engineer, wrecking his back when a bridge fell on him and losing much of his hearing before teaching me when I was a lieutenant)--the real-life J. R., as I was saying, requested that I write this study based on his superb plot device.)
*****
He never bitched about it, but Jeremiah Raymond (J.R.) Roberts had a tough time during his six years in the Army. He'd gone through two deployments into Afghanistan, each of them 13 months long, so he wasn't impressed when Marine veterans talked about their "long" 6-month tours. J.R. had been what was called a "light infantryman," but there was nothing "light" about humping 240 rounds of 5.56 ammo for his M-4 carbine, one smoke and two fragmentation grenades, flak jacket, helmet, gas mask, canteens, and (the cherry on the cake) a pack that weighed about 130 MORE pounds, including spare clothing, a minimal bedroll, chemical protective suit, a Claymore mine, and three days' worth of MREs. (In basic training, he'd learned that an MRE, or Meal Ready to Eat, gave him enough calories to carry all that crap, but the MRE was neither a meal, nor ready, nor edible, three lies in one, sort of like the Holy Roman Empire.)
Dragging all that junk up and down mountains in freezing or boiling temperatures turned out to be the easy part; the HARD part was watching innocent children and good friends being splattered across the landscape by explosive devices, mortar fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and plain ol' dumb bullets. Not to mention air support that fell short. (One time, his lieutenant went to the village elders to apologize because one of their trucks had gotten stuck and damaged the local dirt road; the tribal leader told him "Don't worry about it; the Russians always got stuck in the same place!")
J.R. finally realized that the Army would keep sending him "down range" again and again until there wasn't enough of him left to fill a body bag, at which point he would get a permanent change of station to the veterans' cemetery nearest his home--a "Real Estate deal." As it was, his left knee still throbbed when the humidity was high, and he'd lost 30 percent of his hearing--you couldn't wear earplugs and still listen for the telltale "click" of an AK rifle being cocked, so he went through 8 or 9 firefights and a dozen mortar attacks, each lasting about 4 minutes and every second of that time exceeding the 145 decibels that was the maximum safe level for the human inner ear. So, J.R. felt lucky to walk away with all his limbs, most of his brains and hearing, and his three stripes as a sergeant E-five; lots of his buddies didn't have that much to show for being a One-One-Bravo Infantryman.
J.R. also gained some imponderable but valuable skills, such as prioritizing tasks and a willingness to work hard to achieve difficult goals. Those skills made it simple (if not always easy) for him to excel in college. And he got to attend college because he had an Honorable Discharge that qualified him for the so-called G.I. Bill, which offered him a number of benefits from no-closing-cost home mortgage to tuition and limited subsistence costs for college. Lately, the big talkers in Congress had added a number of bells and whistles onto the G.I. Bill, but he never thought about those add-ons until the events of this story, which occurred when he was a junior at the University of Texas at Austin.
*****
Loneliness was almost a given; his experiences were so different from those of non-veterans that he had difficulty relating to them socially. He'd learned the hard way that sufficient quantities of alcohol or pot could temporarily blot out his pain and make him the life of the party, but they also caused him to do stupid things and be physically ill, so he avoided such things--once again, the Army had been right to crack down on substance abuse, even though he missed the self-medicative properties of such things.
He had finally fallen into a loose collection of younger students--hell, almost ALL of the students and even some of the professors were younger than he--with whom he could study and occasionally share a pizza or a movie. But there seemed to be an invisible barrier around him that made serious friendships, let alone romance, impossible, so he had to settle for a few laughs and casual acquaintances.
One of the girls really got to him, though. Jacqueline (Jackie) Haralson had dirty blond hair, a cute nose, and a curvy body. She was a bubbly young woman, neither arrogant nor stupid, who seemed to enjoy J.R.'s company but showed no romantic interest in him. Instead, she treated him like an older brother who was fun to be around and an (occasional) source of advice and help. He hated the Friend Zone, damn it.
Jackie was on her second try at college, having flunked out the first time with a D plus average. She didn't like to talk about that failure, but J.R. got the impression she had lacked writing skills and spent more time partying than studying. That false start made her closer in age to J.R. than most of their friends. Now, she was taking only one course at a time while trying--on a waitress's salary!--to pay at least the interest on her previous student loans. It seemed to be a race between finishing her degree and being foreclosed on her loans--and her degree was losing the race.
Good sergeants almost instinctively take care of their troops even when the troops screw up--it was genetically encoded in all non-commissioned officers. Against his own better judgement, J.R. had given her a number of small loans and a lot of good advice about how to succeed, not to mention photocopying his own notes in their courses together when she missed class, but privately he worried about her future. Like most other students in the new world of the 35th Amendment, Jackie had been slave graded (Choice) and put up her cute body as collateral for her college loans. Defaulting on those loans meant losing her freedom, her clothes, and even her "virtue;" the bank could just take her to court to establish how many years of servitude she owed in return for her loans and accumulated interest. Even after she regained her freedom, society regarded all ex-slaves, especially ex-female slaves, as insatiable sluts who had lost their brains along with their rights. She might be a screw-up, but she didn't deserve THAT--at least she was trying.
J.R. wanted to help her, of course, but his savings were far too small to satisfy the bank; Jackie owed something like $46,000, and the interest was making that number grow rather than shrink. He worried about her but couldn't see any way for her to avoid a collar in the long run.