Several months had passed since Yong had been in hospital. The rehab had taken a bit longer than anticipated but by the end of January 2508 he was reporting back for duty.

During his incapacitation his regiment had seen some action without him, taken part on some skirmishes along the border, especially on Verbena. Naturally there had been some more losses, also among the officers. Yong was genuinely happy to see several of his junior officers from the operation on Sihnon still alive, among them Captains Richards and Mendes, and telling from their warm greetings when he walked in the staff room the first day they felt similar too. They actually offered Yong to call them by their first names, Ely and Mike, but he kindly rejected the offer, insisting on maintaining some sense of protocol, at least as long as they were still at the base. Other new captains had joined their ranks, including former lieutenant Clarin Dao recently promoted to captain. The young woman was one of the few females in the 37th. She had fought on Sihnon and lost most of her comrades. Underneath her sense of duty to the Alliance was a hardly concealed desire for revenge. There were also two new graduates from the Sihnon War College who had also been put under his command, both very unexperienced. Their attitude towards the Unification War revealed a certain arrogance towards the realities of fighting the Browncoats, either a result of thorough War College indoctrination, or sheer naivety, most likely a mixture of both. Nevertheless, they were quite different in character. Captain Wesley Venner made no secret of his privileged background and his disdain for the common soldier. He seriously believed the Independents could be beaten within a couple of weeks if the right tactics were employed and a maximum of troops deployed, which in reality of course did not exist. The boy had written a paper on it and seemed to think his presence at the front would assure the implementation of his genius plan. The fact that he refused to be bought out of the c