Sixty percent of soldiers were men. That figure shot up to 85 percent when you started talking about the Jacket jockeys who were out bleeding on the front lines. After twenty years fighting an enemy whose identity we didn’t even know, losing ground day by day, we grunts didn’t need another muscle-bound savior who grunted and sweat and had hamburger for brains just like we did. Yeah, if it were me calling the shots in the General Staff Office, I’d have picked a woman too.

Wherever the U.S. Spec Ops were deployed, morale soared. The UDF had been beaten to the cliff’s edge, but they were finally able to start moving back from the brink. After finishing the war in North America, they moved on to Europe and then North Africa. Now they’d come to Japan, where the enemy was knocking on the door of the main island of Honshu.

The Americans called Rita the Full Metal Bitch, or sometimes just Queen Bitch. When no one was listening, we called her Mad Wargarita.

Rita’s Jacket was as red as the rising sun. She thumbed her nose at the lab coats who’d spent sleepless months refining the Jackets’ polymer paint to absorb every last radar wave possible. Her suit was gunmetal red-no, more than that, it glowed. In the dark it would catch the faintest light, smoldering crimson. Was she crazy? Probably.

Behind her back they said she painted her suit with the blood of her squad. When you stand out like that on the battlefield, you tend to draw more than your share of enemy fire. Others said she’d stop at nothing to make her squad look good, that she even took cover behind a fellow soldier once. If she had a bad headache, she’d go apeshit, killing friend and foe alike. And yet not a single enemy round had ever so much as grazed her Jacket. She could walk into any hell and come back unscathed. They had a million stories.

Your rank and file soldier ended up with a lot of time on his hands, and listening to that sort of talk, passing it on, embellishing it-that was just the sort of thing he needed to kill time and to keep the subject off dead comrades. Rita had been a Jacket jockey eating and sleeping on the same base as me, but I’d never seen her face until that moment. We might have resented the special treatment she got, if we’d had the chance to think about it.