Castellanos reached into her pocket and taking out a round. There was a hole in the back, it clearly wasn't 'live,' but for teaching purposes.
"The bullet's been replaced with a paintball-like round. And you will be wearing body armor, because trust me, these little fuckers can leave a welt that'll last a long time. I once caught one in the... hip. I was limping and bruised for a week afterwards."
Brutus lifted an eyebrow, intrigued. "Hip, huh?"
"Hip."
"Uh-huh. Well, let's make sure we don't have a repeat of that," Brutus said. "So how do we use this thing?"
Castellanos started her instruction, and Brutus had to admit that the class was remarkably clear. Part of it of course was that Castellanos had Brutus echo her movements, demonstrating each step with her own M4 before he did the same.
"So after you put it on semi, you just aim and squeeze the trigger." She squeezed her trigger. A dry click echoed through the armory, and she rotated her switch back to safe. "Now you try. The M4 is safe for dry firing."
Brutus did as instructed, 'chambering' a non-existent round by pulling the charging handle and then bringing the rifle up to his shoulder and peering through the sight.
"What about accuracy?" he asked as he squeezed the trigger.
When Castellanos didn't answer, only pointing at her selector switch, he quickly cleared the chamber and put the rifle back to safe mode before setting it on the table.
"Sorry. Aiming?"
"During the exercise, we're only going to be on short range scenarios," she said. "Normally, we'd fine-tune your sights, get you comfortable with this rifle. But for this exercise, short range is all we need to worry about."
"What's yours?" he asked, intrigued.
"Seven right, three up," Castellanos said automatically. "It's something you just know after a while."
"And how accurate is that?" Brutus asked. "It always seems like in movies that people shoot a hundred times and don't hit anything."
"That's usually plot armor," Castellanos joked.
Brutus laughed.
"Truth is, it's not that hard to adjust to someone else's rifle. A common trick that a lot of drill sergeants do in basic training to inspire confidence in the new privates is they take just some random private's rifle, without any adjustments, and go out on the qualification range. They might not hit a perfect score, but they always qualify."
"And your score?"
"With the M4? I shot thirty-nine out of forty my last trip to the qualification range. Anyway, let's keep going, then I'll go over the body armor you're going to be wearing. That might be more familiar to you, Mr. Shoulder Pads."
Brutus grinned, wondering if he'd heard the little note of flirtation in her voice that he thought he'd heard. He wasn't sure, and had restrained himself from doing anything about his self-admitted attraction to Castellanos because he didn't want to fuck things up with the league or the Bluecats. But sometimes when she wasn't clearly annoyed with him for some reason, he'd caught her glancing in his direction, and he thought that maybe she was interested in him as more than just a visitor to her fire team.
And now he heard it in her voice.
They went through the rest of the class, finishing with Brutus breaking down, demonstrating how to clean, and reassembling the M4 in front of him before Castellanos was satisfied.
"Okay during the exercise, still make sure you check off with me after you do any cleaning or field stripping." She locked the weapons up, "but nice job. Now onto what we'll be wearing. Follow me."
Castellanos led Brutus deeper into the arms room, to a huge triple rack of vests on thick metal hangars. "Beefy."
"Pick one up, you'll see why," Castellanos said, gesturing. Brutus picked up the vest off the hangar, grunting in surprise when it was fully in his hands.
"Damn, this is heavy," he said.
"That's just the training weight. A full combat load? Fifty pounds, easy. It takes a toll on your body."
Brutus took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "Why aren't they making it... I don't know, lighter? I mean, every year they're coming out with lighter and lighter weight equipment for us. I think my game day uniform's about ten or eleven pounds, and that's distributed across my entire body to include my cleats, helmet, and pants."
“Oh no, this is the lightweight stuff," Castellanos said sadly. "Brutus, I know you don't quite get it, but it's this sort of shit that takes out so many soldiers I've lost count. Guys go over a wall to get out of the line of fire, and their knees get blown out because they're landing with all that extra weight. Or their spines get turned to glass and jelly by landing just a little too hard on a parachute landing, or coming off a rappel a bit too hard, or just having to carry all this shit and another fifty pounds of gear on a ruck march for day after day after day because there's no other way to get all the shit a soldier needs to live from point A to point B in their theater of operations. Good soldiers, their health ruined and their lives forever altered because of the very equipment meant to keep them safe in battle."
