"The fundamental problem with all men is that they are fucking idiots." Staff Sergeant Cooley said bluntly before taking a sip of her coffee. "What compounds the problem is that some of them are so fucking indispensable - I mean we simply could not do the things we do here without them. You must have seen this in your unit before; if you want something carried up a hill or some jihadi strangled to death then there is no way I am messing up my perfect nails to do that."
Jen looked at the Staff Sergeant's nails, they WERE perfect. Far more so than any other soldier she had seen. They were not garishly red, or unusually long, but they were immaculate. Jen took in the rest of this soldier. Her hair was up in a bun, as per regulations, but it had been expensively coloured and looked shiny and healthy in comparison to Jen's which frankly could do with some professional care after 6 months in Afghanistan. Cooley also smelt different - a perfume Jen could not identify but knew immediately was not available in Boots. She was wearing little diamond earrings which caught the lights from behind the counter in the coffee shop they had gone to. She carried herself differently as well. Normally in the Commanding Officer's office, he was king. But when Corporal Jen Upper had been marched in to see him after she had been found with her lips wrapped round the dick of a Captain and his cum leaking out of her, rather than bust her, the CO had deferred to this Staff Sergeant and had simply asked Jen to go have a coffee with her.
"Staff, what is this all about. Something is not adding up." Jen said as boldly as she could. She was slightly put out when Cooley did not even seem to notice and carried on with her dissection of gender politics in the British Army.
"You see Jen, no matter how professional a man is, and trust me, the best in the world work for us; he is still a slave to his dick. In 1995 a joint MI6 and SBS operation in the Balkans went down the pan when it turned out that the Sergeant running the show was fucking his local Serbian translator, and so was the MI6 boss. In 2003 a team working deep inside Iraq before the invasion effectively downed tools when they stumbled on a 'finishing school' for young women outside Baghdad and took up residence. When the next team dropped in it looked like the last days of Rome; a hareem of Arab girls for every soldier. In Columbia, a bodyguarding team we sent to look after their Minister for Drug Eradication was kicked out of the country when two of the them were found stuffed inside the Minister's eighteen year old daughter. Since the Chinese started stepping up their espionage efforts inside the UK there is a beautiful, doe eyed, Asian honeypot in every pub within 20 miles of Stirling Lines. We know this, the lads know this, but they still go out, bring them back to camp and run through them like this is a lads holiday to Phuket."
Jen was not at all sure where this was going but she had a brief fantasy about what it would be like to be taken by two men at once - especially at such an innocent age, what an experience that must be. Pulling her attention back to the room, she still was not getting any closer to the answers she wanted.
"Staff, what does any of this have to do with me?" She said, more pleadingly this time.
"How do you help the Army, Jen?
"Well I'm a medic. I look after the guys when they are hurt."
"Anything else?"
"I suppose I look after their health all the time. I make sure they don't get unnecessarily injured, or sick. I keep them healthy."
Cooley's voice went very low and steady. "Well Jen, I do something very similar. I protect my Regiment, who in turn protect my Country. I make sure that those who carry the heaviest burdens get the most support. I protect them from themselves and others."
Jen stared at her blankly, waiting for any indication of what the hell she was talking about.
Staff Sergeant Cooley's face broke into a smile. "I also suck quite a lot of cock. You know, professionally." Jen took a much bigger swallow of coffee than she meant and burnt her tongue. She looked hard at Cooley, trying to decide if this was some kind of a joke, but before she could ask a question, the Staff Sergeant continued. "Since we formed F Troop and started giving the guys what they want whenever they want it, there has been a huge drop in the number of dramas caused by soldiers and their dicks. Our security is tighter, our operational output higher and our retention of the best operators is better.
"So, you sleep with them? Like a prostitute?" Asked Jen, trying to not freak out about the whole thing as her brain clunked the gears.
"If you wanted to call me a whore I would have a hard time arguing against that logically." Replied Cooley, "But I prefer to think of myself like a loving wife who makes sure all of my husband's needs are met so he doesn't stray. It just so happens that I have several husbands and they take a lot of satisfaction."
"But how can you do this, you're a soldier like me?" asked Jen, wondering again why this woman had come all this way to see her.