A convicted soldier serves his time and builds a new unit

Question

I was pretty sure that the story is from Starship Troopers, but upon reading it again, I realized it isn't. From what I remember, the main character (possibly an officer) is convicted and sent to a military prison somewhere in a desert. Here using his knowledge he manages to rally some of outcast prisoners. I distinctly remember 2 fragments:

One of the outcasts gets into a fight and the main character fights alongside him, so the next morning the both do their push-ups next to one another.

The guards split the prisoners into men and women and make them carry sand to build two piles. It was some kind of contest. The main character thinks if the prisoners had a leader he could make sure that the men slow down so both groups would finish in the same time.

Finally, due to the war going badly they get reinstated on a starship. I think the unit calls itself "Rats" and they have a inscriptions on their belt buckle reading something like "Touch me if you dare".

I think the enemy was called Arachnids, and this was one of several stories on the same theme. Also, I read it in Romanian, so it might not be a English story at all, and the quotes might not be accurate.

Edit:

The book where this story is had a series of stories related to the same war, most of them unremarkable, the only thing I remember is that the first story was somehow related to merchants and a bar brawl. The stories didn't have common characters.

The story I'm looking for starts with the main character arriving at the prison camp, and ends when the prisoners are reinstated.

Answer 1

This is one of the stories in The Siege of Arista (The War Years #2)

Not sure if I still have a copy, as I recall this story is towards the end of the collection. The central character is a battalion commander who is convicted and sent to military prison. (I cannot remember exactly what he was convicted of, possibly disobeying orders when he was in a no-win situation when Arista was badly losing the war. Notable scene is that when he is convicted and marched in front of his battalion, instead of performing an about-face and symbolically shunning him, the battalion presents arms and salutes him.)

The incidents are as described - there is slightly crazy prisoner who gets in a fight and the officer joins in, then does the described push ups as punishment afterwards. This is his first recruit, he then proceeds to effectively take control of the entire military prison, with one of the key characters being a female prisoner called 'Doc'.

When the war is going really badly, the brass then come to him and reinstate him, putting him in command of the Rats. The group are assigned to defend a space station, not a spaceship. The final action is the defence of the space station. The story ends with the defence unexpectedly succeeding, albeit with high casualties, and the main character and Doc sharing a moment of peace before the next attack wave comes in.

Regarding the first story in the collection - a group of special forces soldiers are sent to "make a statement" in an escalating trade situation by killing a group of the aliens in a bar fight. This is a horribly bad miscalculation - the aliens respond in a massive swarm within minutes, destroy the bar and everyone in it and proceed to continue destroying the entire town or city. The only survivor of the mission is the sergeant who was acting as an observer from a distance away.

As noted by the OP, each of the stories is about a different group of characters and examines a different theme. For example, one of the stories is about an invalided ex-soldier called "Papa" who is put to work in logistics and ends up investigating profiteering and deliberately low-quality military supplies.