Recruitment

I talk a lot about my life as a clone soldier, how our battles are bloody, our lives are irrelevant, how many of us suffer from madness, how we just don't care. But I have never talked about how you enter this life, how do you become a clone soldier? But before that question, why would you want this life?

We scream, we suffer, we die, we get reborn and do it all over again until eternity. The ISK we earn is pocket money when compared to capsuleers, and most of the time they sit comfortably in their pods, away from all the pain, suffering and misery they create, and are a part of, while we suffer through it all every day just get a couple hundred thousand ISK. Why would you ever want to become a clone soldier? Sometimes, you don't have that choice.

If you have ever heard of the Valklears, they are an elite Minmatar military, and they recruit criminals sentenced to death. They go around the various tribal courts and look for potential recruits to offer them an alternative life in the military instead of death. Many Matari clone soldiers had served in the Valklears, the kind of shit we go through isn't that far off from being a Valklear.

Like the Valklears, I was recruited by the Federation from the Stacmon court. I was being sentenced to death for all the crimes I had commited in the Syndicate, and in Federation space. I was offered an alternative, join the clone soldier program. On paper we volunteer for these programs, but in reality it's more like drafting. From what I have seen, most of the people who are recruited into clone soldier programs are former criminals and murderers, no wonder how many of them seem to lack any common sense.

Of course, not all are forced to join the program, some have actually volunteered willingly. Why? For patriotism, maybe, or maybe for the ISK, who knows. But not everyone with an ISK sign on their eyes and a glint of patriotism can join this program. You need to have seen combat, you need to be good at it, and you must be willing to throw your life away, those are just a few of the various things recruiters are trying to find from potential clone soldiers.

We are an even more select bunch than capsuleers. All they have to do usually is have the right genes to be compatible with the capsule neural interface, and then they are shoved into an academy where they turn normal men into demigods basically. We have to go through years of pain and suffering before we are even considered for the clone soldier program.

When you finally get recruited and you join the program, you can pretty much say goodbye to your previous life forever. The kind of things they make you go through in training, it can be brutal, and it can change a person quite significantly. Going back to being a mortal, a baseliner as capsuleers often call them, is virtually an impossibility. Maybe that's why most clone soldiers are former criminals, they have no lives to go back to, making it easier to let go. Let go of what? Your humanity.

We are constantly being told in training how our bodies are worthless, and the only thing that is valuable in us is the information we carry in our brains. The first time we get our implants installed, we are actively encouraged and pushed to kill ourselves. We are given a weapon with a single bullet, with a note that tells us to kill ourselves. “Self-preservation is the basest of instincts. Only by subverting the will to live can you truly become immortal", they say. Maybe there is some merit to that. By not caring about your life at all, can you become the ultimate immortal soldier.

Then when you finally pull the trigger and let go of your basic instincts, we go to the extremely brutal part. Both males and females get shoved into stock 200 pound clones. We do firearm training with live rounds killing each other. We are trained to ignore the pain, keep going and do everything in your abilities to complete your objective, even going as far as using your injured and dying squadmate as a meatshield to get through a wall of gunfire.

When all of that is done and you complete your training, you get deployed into your own quarters, you get your first selection of dropsuit fits and you are left like that to fend for yourself. At that point, we could barely be considered human anymore, detached from normal life, detached from death and pain itself. Some regain their humanity, and then work their way to become corporation CEOs, renowned soldiers, great tacticians or anything else you can imagine. The others, they lose their last shreds of humanity and become mindless killing machines.

That again begs the question, why would you want this? Everyone has their own reasons, but why did I become a clone soldier? I believe in Ida. Even if I was sentenced to death, I would have been reborn to a new life, a better life maybe. Why did I choose this one instead? I do not know. Whatever my reasons were a year ago, have long been forgotten. All I can say now, is that I do not regret it.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ   

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