Dragon Army

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Dragon Army was the fictional play-army which Ender Wiggin was assigned to command in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It's assigned colors are grey, orange, grey.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Battle School faculty conspired to make Ender's leadership seem as difficult as possible. Instead of inheriting an existing army whose leader was graduating, Ender was given only students who'd never been in an army or had been put up for transfer by their current commander (i.e. students who weren't considered any good). The name Dragon had previously been decommissioned due to superstitions about how none of the previous Dragon armies ever won even a third of their battles. In the novel Ender's Shadow, it's revealed that the army's initial roster was composed by Bean.

After its revival, Dragon Army never suffered a loss under Ender. Among the unusual challenges thrown at Dragon:

  • Late notice of the battle, which gave the enemy five minutes to deploy into the arena without threat.
  • Unusually frequent battles to induce fatigue: daily instead of biweekly.
  • Combining two enemy armies into a single, double-strength enemy.
  • Imbalanced arrangements of "terrain" to favor the opposing army.
  • Automatic reanimation of "disabled" enemy soldiers.

Dragon pioneered several strategies and techniques in the Battle Room:

  • Dragon was organized into five platoons ("toons"), each with eight soldiers, instead of the traditional four platoons of ten soldiers.
  • Sub-commanders that allowed the platoons to split in half, creating ten platoons of four.
  • The use of a sixth "special" platoon made up of members of other platoons for special tasks such as reconnaissance (this was Bean's toon)
  • Disinclination to use the traditional formation tactics.
  • The use of an unbreakable cable to allow otherwise-impossible mid-air direction changes.
  • Conceptualizing the game objective, the enemy's gate, as "down", to get past the ambiguous up-down orientation of the rest of Battle School.
  • A new fighting position using the legs to shield the body. Though this technique, which was developed by Ender, was taught in his special practice sessions prior to Dragon's formation, Dragon was the first army to fully capitalize on the strategy.
  • The use of larger soldiers as shielding platforms for smaller soldiers to defend themselves with. The smaller soldier would become a shooter with two blasters while the larger would simply be a frozen platform.

[edit] Members of Dragon Army

Each Battle School army has 40 soldiers and one commander. Only the following Dragon Army soldiers were named in the Ender series:

Of the other soldiers, Bean recalls that two (in addition to Suriyawong) are from Thailand; no information is given about the remaining twenty-five.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series
Anton's Key | Battle School | Command School | Dragon Army | Formics
Free People of Earth | Hierarchy of Alienness | International Fleet
Molecular Disruption Device | Pequeninos | Philotes | Philotic Web | Stark
Books | Characters | Concepts
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