LGM Up Close and Personal
LGM Up Close and Personal
See, my life is a pain in the ass. I grew up in a special Bolo Military Academy, knowing since the age of 4 that I was going to be living my life, earning my keep, on the Bolo battlegrounds. By the age of nine I could harvest a tree with a single slash of my Martini puukko. In school they made it all sound so exciting: planting pillboxes, placing mines, building roads, bridges, houses, being a loyal soldier valiant in his efforts to assist his side, to perform at whoever's calling whatever task may be necessary to help defeat the enemy.
Now I'm out of school. Nearly all my classmates have been shot or have died while trying to perform some action on a mined square. At night I hear the echos of their dying cries. "Aahhh! They got me!" I live each moment in fear that my commander will send me out on some stupid mission: to travel through 24 squares of swamp in enemy territory to pick a tree near an enemy base while someone is refuelling there, to plant a mine on the square just under the tank, to build anything at all when Mikael has mined the entire map.
Bolo is hell. My feet have permanent blisters from chasing after the tank because the guy in charge won't slow down enough to let me in. I've nearly starved to death hundreds of times after being left on an island as the tank blows up or takes a boat without waiting for me. I've been scalped by thousands of shells flying low overhead as I'm sent out on a mission in hellishly dangerous territory. I hate this life. But I know of no other, so I carry on. I know my days are numbered, but I'm not scared. At times I wish one of those shells would find me. I'd cry out, but within I would find an inner peace, a perpetual tranquility that would carry me beyond the clouds, well away from this hell of tanks and pills.