Chapter 113: Declaration (2)

While the cast of the female soldier special was enjoying their break in the barracks, the production team of On Duty, All Clear! and the officers of the 3292nd infantry corps had a strategy meeting. The cast members should have been on the verge of crying as they were grilled on the drill ground right about now, but they were enjoying their break in the air-conditioned barracks instead. There was just one reason for this anomaly.

“It seems Miss Kang knows much more about army culture than we’d expected,” the battalion commander remarked.

Director Joo and the other staff members reluctantly agreed. They had heard many rumors that Ra-Eun was much more well-informed about the army than the average woman, but they had not expected her to be knowledgeable to such an abnormal extent.

“We have to admit we’ve made a severe miscalculation. This is quite...”

The production team could not hide their confusion.

The adjutant who was present in the emergency meeting asked, “Could Miss Kang have started her acting career after enlisting in the army as a female soldier?”

“No, that isn’t the case. It’s also impossible age-wise.”

Ra-Eun was twenty-one years old. Even if she had enlisted right after graduating from high school, she would have only been in service for one year; it was impossible.

The battalion commander guffawed as the production team shut down the idea. “Lieutenant Kim here had prepared so much to be one hell of an instructor. He must be disappointed that things aren’t going as he’d expected.”

“No, sir. I’m not disappointed. It seems I’ve underestimated the trainees.”

The lieutenant had expected that the cast would obviously have no idea about what kind of place the army was, since they were women. The only things they would know should have been things that their male acquaintances who had been to the army told them, but such things would not be very helpful. The production team and army officers had expected the participants to completely lose their composure with just a little scare, so they had never expected them to do this well.

Just then, Lieutenant Kim Yeong-Dae’s eyes glinted. “There’s still something we can try.”

They had a secret weapon that would make anyone, even Kang Ra-Eun, scared out of their wits.

“How about we do a fast pace drill?”

This was the root of the siren.

***

An announcement declaring fast pace played from the orderly room along with the siren. The soldiers who had done nothing wrong were forced to exclaim, “Fast pace!” all of a sudden, all because of Lieutenant Kim’s abrupt fast pace operation.

Lieutenant Kim came out of the orderly room and shouted at the soldiers preparing their military gear, “Who told you to move like slugs in such an emergency situation?! Get your goddamn shit together! Should I tell the first sergeant to confiscate your free time and fill them with cleaning shifts?”

“N-No, sir!’

“People from the broadcasting station are watching, so move your asses! Understood?!”

“Yes, sir!”

The army was good at showing off, if anything else. Since people from the station were filming them, they needed to move even faster than how they were trained.

Not only that, the program On Duty, All Clear! was one that high-ranking officers of the army regularly watched. The moment they did or said anything troubling that was to be shown to the audience, no one knew what sort of punishment from the superiors would be waiting for them. Hence, Lieutenant Kim was thinking of engraving into the female cast’s minds the true essence of the army.

‘I’m sure they’ll be bewildered now that fast pace has been declared.’

Even soldiers lost their composure in such situations, so there was no way that the female participants who had only entered the army today wouldn’t.

Lieutenant Kim confidently walked to the female cast’s barracks. His steps felt extremely light, possibly because he was looking forward to grilling them. He couldn’t wait to unleash his powerful voice as he arrived at the third barracks where the women were in.

“What the hell are you doing in an emergency situa—!”

As he was about to swing open the door with a roar, he came across Ra-Eun who was about to come out to the hallway through the barracks door.

“Sir,” Ra-Eun said.

Lieutenant Kim almost exclaimed, “This is it!” but managed to suppress it.

‘Gotcha,’ he thought. He then raised his voice, “Can’t you see we’re in an emergency? Where do you think you’re going, trainee?!”

Ra-Eun was not the least bit flustered from Lieutenant Kim’s roar. Rather, she proudly said to him, “I was about to go get the key to the gun locker from the orderly room.”

“The key to the gun locker?”

Lieutenant Kim stared at Ra-Eun dumbfoundedly due to the unexpected answer. Ra-Eun continued as if it was the obvious thing to do.

“Fast pace was declared, so shouldn’t we first take out the firearms?”

It was correct to first take one’s personal firearm in such a situation. This wasn’t all Ra-Eun had in mind.

“I also told my squad members to pack all of their personal belongings and military gear into duffel bags while I went to get the key. I was also thinking of guard post deployment, but we hadn't been told which post we needed to go to, so we’d been standing by.”

“...”

Lieutenant Kim thought he was dreaming with every second that Ra-Eun was talking. She possessed the ability to direct her fellow squad members, proficiency in handling situations, and the most important trait for a soldier to have, the ability to brief an officer without shaking.

The lieutenant was lost for words as he looked at Ra-Eun who possessed everything necessary as a soldier. She was an S-tier squad leader. Lieutenant Kim had lost three times in a row to Ra-Eun and her military temperament.

***

After being trained in basic close-order drills, the female soldiers had to go through PRI training, which new recruits feared most. PRI, short for preliminary rifle instruction, was to teach recruits the fundamentals of rifle firing. However, contrary to its simple-sounding name, it was known among soldiers to be brutal enough to cause bleeding, muscle knots, and make one’s teeth grind. Ra-Eun also thought the same.

“Aim at the 200-meter target!”

The trainees laid down prone as Lieutenant Kim shouted. It had only been twenty minutes since they had begun the PRI repetition training, but the members were already wailing.

“What’s the point of this training...”

“Is training like this even useful?”

“I have no idea...!”

Jo In-Hye and Jang Yu-Ha expressed the most dissatisfaction with the training. As they were complaining about how the nails that they had worked hard to polish were being ruined, Lieutenant Kim raised his voice.

“Who the hell told you to talk among yourselves during training?!”

“S-Sorry, sir!” the two women said as they got back into position.

The trainees were endlessly going back and forth from the low ready position to lying prone. Only two of the seven still had some leeway to keep going. One was obviously the only active-duty former high school girl Kang Ra-Eun, and the other was Min Bo-Yeon, who had trained her stamina to death in the Olympic Village ever since she was little.

Ra-Eun stole a glance at Bo-Yeon.

‘She’s holding on pretty well. I guess she has the endurance for it.’

Yu-Ha, Han Ga-Ae, In-Hye, Seo Tae-Yeon and Choi Hye-Yun were almost on the verge of collapsing.

~

Fifty minutes had passed since the PRI training started.

“We will take a ten-minute break and then go into zero shooting training. Squad, remove covers!”

The cast tilted their heads in confusion.

“C-Covers?”

“I’m not taking off my clothes.”

Lieutenant Kim sighed deeply as the women were reacting sensitively.

“By covers, I mean your helmets. I’m telling you to take them off. Understood?”

“Oh...!”

“Y-Yes, sir!”

The helmet had sweatbands, but wearing them for such a long period of time would cause sweat to continue forming from the forehead. It felt as if they were flying through the air when they took off their helmets as their heads were heating up.

Yu-Ha said while looking back and forth at Ra-Eun and Bo-Yeon during the break, “It looks like Ra-Eun and Bo-Yeon are the aces of this squad.”

“I agree, unnie. They looked like they could still go on for twice as long.”

“Ra-Eun doesn’t even surprise me anymore, but Bo-Yeon was unexpected. How did you manage to get through that so easily? Do you have some sort of know-how?”

Bo-Yeon smiled bitterly. “There’s no such thing. I can just handle it since I’ve been training since I was little.”

“What about your knees and elbows? Don’t they hurt?”

“I’m fine. They’d already been scraped to no end during my time in the Olympic Village, so this is nothing to me.”

“That’s amazing...”

Bo-Yeon expressed awkwardness as the older women praised her.

“Maybe Bo-Yeon will get the highest score among us during the shooting training!”

“Oh yeah, they said something about giving the one who comes in first place a prize.”

Bo-Yeon was superior in terms of physical capabilities, but...

‘Physical prowess isn’t everything in the army.’

The army demanded a variety of abilities from the soldiers, and the most valuable one was obviously experience.

‘The one who’s done it before is always bound to be better.’

A reservist was not to be underestimated. One could take a K9 Thunder to the middle of Seoul and ask any reservist soldier to fire it; most of them would be able to without question.

However, Bo-Yeon did not know of Ra-Eun’s secret, and said to her while blatantly aiming for the first place spot, “I’ll be taking first place this time, Ra-Eun.”

.

She seemed to be quite obsessed with being first, possibly because she was an athlete. Ra-Eun did not give her an answer; she simply smiled.

***

They moved on to live fire exercises after the zero shooting training. The majority of the female cast members displayed poor shooting accuracy due to their fear of holding and firing a real gun for the first time. On the other hand, Bo-Yeon was fairly calm.

“Check target.”

“Checking target!”

The trainees laid down their K2 rifles and walked over to the target as per the supervisor’s command. Bo-Yeon smiled as soon as she saw her target, and lifted the sheet up in front of the camera.

“One, two, three, four... eighteen out of twenty on the mark.”

The other cast members only had seven or eight out of twenty. However, Bo-Yeon’s triumphant attitude did not last very long.

“Trainee Kang Ra-Eun, perfect!”

All twenty of her shots had hit the mark. Not just that, all of them were accurately grouped into one area of the target. Bo-Yeon was completely dumbfounded by Ra-Eun’s perfect score.

Meanwhile, the battalion commander, who had been watching the shooting competition between the women from the back, secretly asked Lieutenant Kim.

“Why don’t we ask Miss Kang if she’d like to enlist as a female soldier after the shoot is over?”

He was being dead serious.

1. Fast pace is the exercise term for DEFCON 2 (defense readiness condition); it is the next step to nuclear war, where armed forces must be ready to deploy and engage within six hours.

2. Some people might know it as Preliminary Marksmanship Instruction (PMI) or Basic Rifle Marksmanship (BRM), but it is referred to as PRI in the Korean army.