WASHINGTON—Touting them as the next stage in modernized combat, representatives for the United States military unveiled today a new line of bionically enhanced “super-soldiers,” capable of withstanding the enormous mental toll of war.
Commanders introduced the next-generation, biologically modified troops at a press conference in Washington, telling reporters that the elite military personnel have been engineered to mentally withstand limitless amounts of violence and bloodshed on the battlefield, which would then prevent them from experiencing future bouts of paranoia, anxiety, and crippling depression.
“Today we embark upon an exciting new frontier in 21st-century warfare,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, standing beside a tightly formed platoon of the augmented soldiers, whom the four-star general described as “impervious” to ever feeling on-edge or completely numb to the world. “These new servicemen are capable of fulfilling all the duties of their unmodified counterparts, but without the tendency to suffer severe mental breakdowns over what they have seen and done on the front lines.”
“These brave, mentally reshaped men and women can be deployed and redeployed hundreds if not thousands of times without ever feeling shell shock or combat fatigue,” Dempsey continued. “And in our preliminary tests, not a single super-soldier has tried to end his life by putting a bullet in his head.”
According to members of the armed forces, the bionic infantrymen are surgically outfitted with an impenetrable mental barrier through which terror, sorrow, guilt, and despair cannot pass. They are reportedly capable of all the functions of a standard infantryman, but with an augmented resilience to psychological scarring resulting from the types of pain and anguish no normal human being should ever experience for prolonged periods of time.
Furthermore, sources confirmed these advanced new conscripts are imbued with the unique ability to withstand the butchery of innocent civilians and the abrupt deaths of their squadmates without these episodes haunting them every day for the rest of their lives.
The ability to block out the unending anguish and emotional instability that would typically threaten an unmodified soldier’s mental stability makes the super-soldiers perfectly suited for battle, military officials said.
“In the past, you could only subject an enlisted man to so much trauma before he would, say, have a screaming fit where he couldn’t stop picturing the faces of the Afghani family he accidentally shot to death,” Lieutenant Colonel Marco Bennett said. “But with these new super-soldiers, when a muffler backfires they aren’t sent into a mental tailspin in which they end up crying and hiding underneath their kitchen tables. Their retooled cerebral patterns will never allow them to think about when their rifles got jammed and they had to look their enemies in the face while they stabbed them to death with their bayonets.”
While the military has heralded its futuristic super-soldiers for their ability to withstand life in a hellish war zone, experts claimed the revolutionary bionic army’s true strength comes in its members’ ability to seamlessly move back into civilian life.
For example, the cutting-edge soldiers are fully capable of suppressing any feeling that the government used them as tools of destruction only to immediately discard them. In addition, they feel content, happy even, to have a menial job or no job at all.
“In the past, when normal soldiers did manage to get through their deployment, they often had difficulty adjusting to life back home without turning a gun on their family members,” said U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki, noting that the returning super-soldiers will have no trouble whatsoever relating to people who haven’t seen what they’ve seen. “Now, we can use these bionic troops on the battlefield to whatever extent we require, send them back to their hometowns, and never have to worry about providing them with costly medical treatment and counseling.”
“Which is pretty convenient, because we were planning on cutting those types of programs next year anyway,” Shinseki added.
