Editing Love and Krieg (section)

===Reconnaissance===
I'd been with Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 for about nine or ten months, and I started getting an impression that things were... different. I mean, the rations were waiting for me when I came home from work every day, but there seemed to be the barest half-inch of slouch when she marched about the garden, and I swear I saw her tapping her foot once when she was standing to attention outside the front door ready to receive the postman.

She was an indoctrinated soldier, after all. She needed action! Truth be told, there wasn't much call for war where we were, so I could understand where she was coming from. I had a look through the paper, and as luck would have it I saw that the Army was having one of its open days in the area. You know the type - let everyone have a poke inside an APC, dump helmets on top of the kids and let them pretend they're big damn heroes, rope some of the stronger men into a gun-run tournament, that sort of thing.

Wielding this, I approached Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 and declared portentously "Soldier, we are embarking on a mission - a training op to test your ability to perform an intelligence-gathering reconnaissance operation, to determine potential enemy capabilities!"

I don't know exactly what happened next, but things went a bit spinny and when I woke up I was in the public car park area of the local duke's manor, on whose land the open day was being held. Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 was standing before me, dressed in full combat gear - and lathered head to toe in mud and leaves for camouflage.

But the eyepieces of her gas mask were positively gleaming!

The open day was being held on a stretch of water-meadow beside the river which ran underneath the duke's manor. It was, as I said, your usual deal - a few vehicles pulled up, small gazebos with stands and soldiers demonstrating miscellaneous bits of equipment and arranging photos of civvies smiling with night-vision goggles on their heads, and a corporal trying to disentangle children from over-enthusiastic knot-tying practice.

I'd been amongst the crowd for a few minutes when I turned around and realized that Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 wasn't actually with me. For a while I span around, disoriented, but after catching a glint of a lens from the treeline over on the other side of the river I tramped over and found Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 lying under strewn branches in her own foxhole, viewing the open day through binoculars literally screwed into the rims of her gasmask's eyepieces and scratching copious notes into a... pink Moleskin notebook (I suppose the woman will out somewhere).

She seemed disappointed that I had found her - I wondered if concealment was part of the fun. She brightened up when I suggested that the "enemy alert state was low" and that "close quarters survey" was possible, although several visitors tripped over her as she insisted on leopard-crawling everywhere in the show area. Still, the kids loved it, a big herd of them rolling about trying to imitate her, and all of the soldiers thought that she must have been one of them doing a demonstration and no-one accosted her.

The displays were interesting enough, I suppose although they didn't really interest me - I was there for Krieger Female Model 68b #6345's sake more than anything else. The day was ending and I was just about to suggest that we leave when I saw Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 suddenly standing to attention and being noisily upbraided by a very red and furious-looking staff sergeant.

Alarmed at what this might have entailed - had she tried to "capture enemy equipment to impair their defensive capability" and stolen a gun? - I hurried over to see what was going on, but the staff sergeant roughly shoved me back (which sort of ran counter to the whole open day ethos before anything else). What struck me more, though, is that Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 took absolutely NO action to intervene...

I shuffled back over to the car park and watched her for the next couple of hours. As the light fell and sunset came she spent the time helping the other soldiers box up the display, being regularly castigated and upbraided by the apoplectic staff sergeant (who I gathered from the faint echoes of his bawling mistook Krieger Female Model 68b #6345 for another soldier actually back on base).

When she came back, she had taken off her mask, and was wearing a faint smile and rouge-dusted cheeks, flush with the pleasure of being ordered about, which the low sun didn't entirely conceal.

I think I felt a little stab of jealousy that day.