Corporal Perry, USMC, did not think much of the announcement over the radio. First, because she was numb to bad news by now. Second, because she had been on the frontlines for the last six months and anyone who had been around that long knew what was going on to a pretty good extent.<br/><br/>Long gone were the days of massive maneuver battles between high-tech armored formations as the skies roared, trails of fire raining down in the form of aircraft shot down in the dogfights going on overhead. All that had ended years ago. The attrition rates in men and materials could not support such efforts for long. When she came back to Europe after a lengthy stay in the US to heal from a nasty leg wound, the M1 Abrams had become a martyred saint of armored warfare. The last Apache helicopter anyone had seen in the last year was a blackened wreck on the other side of the river, which people used as a landmark when spotting enemy movement over there. Fixed-wing aircraft had been pulled back even before that, never to return. Perry guessed they would be hoarded for homeland defence.<br/><br/>Shame they had not decided to do the same with the troops.<br/><br/>Perry sat on a firing step in a trench, next to a dugout with a dummy machinegun on it. The weapon was actually a broken assault rifle she had bulked up with bricks packed into cloth cut from a rucksack to simulate an ammo box under the broken gun. The dugout could not be entered from the trenches because the entrance was blocked with a steel plate to protect the trench. The idea was to entice the Russians or their Eastern-European allies to hit the dugout first with their heavy weapons and reveal their positions or intentions. The plate would protect the trench itself from the shrapnel, and Perry was just done reaffirming it in place, packing some more earth around the base, when she received the message. The MARSOC operator dropped her shovel blade-first and sat down to have a breather.<br/><br/>The way she looked at it, the message simply meant that the chain of command had broken down completely. Usually, it had been a temporary thing. Radio transmissions from command posts would attract artillery fire, so the more undisciplined officers died first. Then, the veteran ones bought it when the enemy got lucky guesses or staged frighteningly good ambushes. Thwarting those had been the job of Perry´s unit when they first came to Europe. And then, well, it was just a long and slow string of skirmishes, pitched battles, ambushes, artillery barrages and air attacks. Oh, and desertions, of course. All of which meant that officer academies in the States could not keep up with training replacements, and the ones they sent were worse and worse. A nasty issue that worried Perry to no end, because nowadays you just didn´t know who was competent and who wasn´t. Perry wondered if she was competent herself, having entered the service in the last third of the war, more or less. Was she up to task like the professional soldiers from before the war started had been?<br/><br/>Who knew? Who cared anymore?<br/><br/>The woman was tired of war. She did not know what came next, so she simply stared at the command tent, waiting to see what the officers intended to do. As for herself, she had a clear about it: if there was no mission anymore, warriors went home. Simple as that. So Perry watched, a part of her too numb by the calm around her to react, and another part eager... no, starved for a reason to pick up her things and start walking west.