Free All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

killed and how to get your enemy killed—the only way to know a thing like that is to do it. Some kid who’d been taught how to swing a sword in a dojo didn’t stand a chance against a man who’d been tested in battle. They knew it, and they kept doing it. That’s how they piled up hundreds of corpses. One swing at a time.”
    “Kiri-oboeru.”
    “That’s right.”
    “So why do they bother training us at all?”
    “Ah, right to the point. Brains like that, you’re too smart to be a soldier.”
    “Whatever, Sarge.”
    “If you really want to fight the Mimics, you need helicopters or tanks. But helicopters cost money, and it takes money to train the pilots, too. And tanks won’t do you a lick of good on this terrain— too many mountains and rivers. But Japan is crawling with people. So they wrap ’em in Jackets and ship ’em to the front lines. Lemons into lemonade.”
    Look what happened to the lemons.
    “All that shit they drum into you in training is the bare minimum. They take a bunch of recruits who don’t know their assholes from their elbows and teach ’em not to cross the street when the light’s red. Look left, look right, and keep your heads down when things get hot. Most unlucky bastards forget all that when the shit starts flying and they go down pretty quick. But if you’re lucky, you might live through it and maybe even learn something. Take your first taste of battle and make a lesson out of it, you might just have something you can call a soldier—” Ferrell cut himself off. “What’s so funny?”
    “Huh?” A smirk had crept across my face while he was talking and I didn’t even notice.
    “I see someone grinning like that before a battle, I start worrying about the wiring in his head.”
    I’d been thinking of my first battle, when Mad Wargarita tried to help me, when my mud-stained guts were burnt to cinders, when despair and fear streamed down my face. Keiji Kiriya had been one of the unlucky bastards. Twice.
    The third time, when I ran, my luck hadn’t been what you’d call good either. But for some reason, the world kept giving me another chance, challenging me to find a way to survive. Not by luck, but on my own.
    If I could suppress the urge to run, I’d keep waking up to a full day of training followed by a day on the battlefield. And what could be better than that? Almost by default, I’d keep learning, one swing at a time. What took those swordsmen ten years, I could do in a day.
    Ferrell stood and gave my backside a slap with his hand, bringing my train of thought to a screeching halt. “Not much point worrying about it now. Why don’t you see about finding one of them coeds?”
    “I’m fine, Sarge, I was just thinking—” Ferrell looked away. I pressed on. “If I live through tomorrow’s battle, there’ll be another battle after that, right? And if I live through that battle, I’ll go on to the next one. If I take the skills I learn in each battle, and in between battles I practice in the simulators, my odds of surviving should keep going up. Right?”
    “Well, if you want to overanalyze—”
    “It can’t hurt to get in the habit of training now, can it?”
    “You don’t give up easy, do you?”
    “Nope.”
    Ferrell shook his head. “To be honest, I had you figured for someone different. Maybe I’m gettin’ too old for this.”
    “Different how?”
    “Listen, there are three kinds of people in the UDF: junkies so strung out they’re hardly alive, people who signed up looking for a meal ticket, and people who were walking along, took a wrong step off a bridge somewhere, and just landed in it.”
    “I’m guessing you had me pegged for the last group.”
    “That I did.”
    “Which group were you in, Sarge?”
    He shrugged. “Suit up in first-tier gear. Meet back here in fifteen minutes.”
    “Sir—uh, full battle dress?”
    “A Jacket jockey can’t practice without his equipment. Don’t worry, I won’t use live rounds. Now suit