The air in Theater Intake Facility was humming with geists – ghostly virtual reality representations of people, A.I.s, and even a few of the sceeve, the horseshoe-bat-nosed aliens whose species had invaded the Earth thirteen years ago. Humanity was at war with the main body of sceeve, but a small faction, the Mutualists, had proved to be valuable allies and had given Earth a chance to fight back and avoid total domination.

Ensign NOCK made his way through the entrance foyer in his entirely physically present android body, his suit, as he called it. His current model was a Burberry Eleven. He’d been suited up in the Eleven for close to a year and it had performed in an excellent, if utilitarian, fashion. The suit NOCK really wanted was one of the new Burberry Twelves – who wouldn’t? – but there was no way he was going to be able to afford an upgrade like that on an Extry ensign’s pay.

All of the virtual inhabitants in the foyer seemed overlaid, one upon another, crowded in layers in such a way that no gathering in real life could ever achieve. Definite scaling problems going on here with the chroma representational software. They appeared as drapes of discrete layers of people, and the entrance foyer had taken on what NOCK imagined might be the décor of a harem den – although visiting a girlfriend in the strip club where she worked on Ceres base was as close as he’d ever come to observing such an establishment.

That had been an interesting liaison. It had been love, at least for his part. Josey had fallen for him precisely because he was an A.I. servant in an android body and not a physical man. Of course, he hadn’t let that fact stop him when attempting to please her. Apparently he’d succeeded for, as Josey had once told him, “NOCK, I gotta say, you put the ‘t’ in simulation.”

Josey had been blown to smithereens by kinetic weapon barrage when a half-ton of sceeve throw mass had ripped into Ceres asteroid base and left a mile-wide crater.

It was a tough war.

Combat drugs are far from unknown in SF. Usually they take the form of a “kamikaze” or “berserker” drug that causes infantrymen (always infantry, never armor or aviation or other operational specialties) to run amok in the face of the enemy and cut down anything that moves. The protagonist is commonly tormented by nightmares filled with half-remembered visions of inhuman crimes. It gets worse with each mission. He begins to fall apart… (Fill in ending here).

This, of course, is nonsense, written from the point of view that warfare is nothing more than organized murder carried out by maniacs. As dangerous, destructive, and regrettable as war may be, it remains, as Clausewitz never ceased to point out, a rational enterprise. Demented behavior is as unacceptable in combat as in any other circumstance. Murder during wartime is a crime, and is punished as such when discovered, as in the case of the Nazi war criminals or the “rogue platoon” in Afghanistan¹. A drug that encouraged irrational behavior would be the last thing anyone would want on a battlefield. (This, by the way, is why the LSD experiments carried out at the Edgewood Arsenal in the 1950s never went anywhere². LSD sprayed on an enemy would leave most of them laid back and grooving, as the experimenters hoped. But there was that small percentage that would have bad trips and then acted out. Bummer, man -- not at all recommended when they might be in control of, say, nuclear weapons.)

Further objections are revealed by the adage “heroes get people killed.” Modern commanders do not like berserkers or kamikazes; neither did Vikings. See Egil's Saga. Neither embodies the qualities required of a soldier on the millennial battlefield: coolness under fire, alertness and a clear head, the ability to follow orders and yet display initiative when called upon. In the final analysis, war is too important to be left to the wild men.

This is not to discount the use of drugs in combat, but to suggest that they will be something quite different from the way they’ve commonly been depicted in fiction. Rather than trigger atavistic R-complex frenzies, military drugs would increase endurance, focus attention and concentration, and modulate fears and other forms of emotional turbulence. Simply put, drugs will be utilized to enhance the effectiveness of good soldiering, to hone, support, and augment the basic military virtues.

What kind of drugs would these be? The best way to answer that is to discover what type of drugs the troops use now. Drugs have always been common in the military. The cup of Navy joe, heavy on the sugar and with enough caffeine to stun a horse, certainly qualifies as a drug, as does the tot of rum doled out to British troops and sailors before battle. Infinitely rebrewed coffee worked to increase alertness and energy, while rum instilled courage (though not recklessness) and calmed fluttering hearts.