Operation Ignoring Leave

For outstanding leadership yet again and directing us cleanly through enemy territory to the airbase without making enemy contact till we got to the perimeter. and then pushing us through to mission completion even with the danger of enemy air in the closing stages.

Excellent mission command; formed a plan, supervised execution of it, kept the cats herded. Good job, Staff.

Excellent leadership. Knew when to be hands off and let us deal with things with an overarching brief, and when to be more hands on to keep cohesion as things got gritty.

A really nice mission, thanks. Managed to make walking through the jungle for twenty minutes fun and atmospheric.

For some Heroic actions moving to support and casualties reinforcing blue squad and for piloting all of the casualties to safety

Sgt Mattock courageously and without regard for his own safety, crossed the open ground of the apron at Gia Lam while under crossfire from two machinegun positions, in order to determine the state of the enemy helicopter flight line to establish whether any were flyable to provide CASEVAC to EGR. Once established, he very competently flew his crew out and made great efforts to preserve the airframe for US recovery.

Led several counter attacks on enemy QRF forces, extracting wounded marines that would otherwise have died of their wounds. Coordinated with squad leaders after initial assault and kept unit cohesion as casualties mounted. Then secured an enemy help, extracting several critically wounded marines from the AO who would otherwise have died.

Sgt Mattock led several counter attacks in an attempt to reach Beltfed who had been overwhelmed by the airfield entire garrison, punching his way through the massed Dorset forces to reach the downed marine and bring her back to the rest of the squad for evac. Additionally his Expert plioting out of the AO in the Hoplite after took out the An-2 Colts. Couldn't have made it out without him, and Clapman and Beltfed owe their lives to him.

For selflessly waking up and getting out of a warm barracks bed and charging towards the incoming medical helicopter in slow motion like a Hollywood movie star diving on Clapman and working up a mild Swett saving her life in a stressful moment semi consciousness on a cold Cheltenham night and the sound of rotor blades in the air and zero threat.

For managing to keep yellow team in the fight after the base assault started and several people becoming casualties for diving in to danger to try and save misstep.

As the only medic assinged to the mission HA Chapman distinguished herself with both rifle and bandage during the clearance of teh base facility. When she wasn't elbow deep in Marine guts, she was killing hostiles with unerring accuracy.

Upon arriving at the airfield, with Yellow Squad assaulting the target and Blue providing cover, Pvt Beltfed used her machine gun to take out several emplaced hostile positions, then took a sentry tower and held it against the entire air fields infantry detatchment until they overwhelmed her.

Beltfed's MG support enabled the airfield assault, suppressing and destroying key enemy positions and enabling the assault team to go in. She then held a guard tower against a short company-strength QRF on her own, before being overwhelmed by weight of numbers.

For being literally the Thin blue line between The main assault and a full battalion of Chelt's as they filtered out of the barracks wholesale only to be gunned down by the stoic reputative thump of a high calibre machine gun Beltfed lived up to their name today and was absolutely the difference between success and failure ensuring a major flanking force was eliminated before anyone else even knew it existed.

Brave and couragous flying to cover the marine helicopters as they lifted from the base. Flying without a tail rotor he helped surpress the emplaced machineguns and allow the squad to escape.

for excelent work covering our consolidation and exfiltration. supressing multiple guard towers and making it possible to deal with medical emergencies and then retreat to the helicopters.

Whatever that thing on Burgerboy's rifle did, she used it to magnificant effect taking out guard towers and other defensive positions during the assault and then the rescue of Beltfed. She then acted as a vital comms relay between the helicopters as we made our exfil.

For outstanding work taking out the machinegun tower in the initial assault. leading the charge in to the base. taking multiple wounds and continuing to fight and be an exemplar of the marine core never giving up slowing down or letting the enemy get between him and the rest of yellow team.
and for taking a a grenade that would certainly have killed both Gucci and Clapman if he hadn't selflessly gotten in the way.

Having somehow picked himself up after being machine gunned multiple times, PFC Misstep valiantly threw himself in front of a grenade that would otherwise have wiped out the only medic assigned to teh squad. His selfless sacrifice save the lives of hte rest of the squad.

Pvt Wrench distinguished himself with great courage and skill, closing with an airmobile QRF short platoon disembarking from an Mi-8 to throw a satchel charge, destroying the helicopter and neutralising the dismounts. Acting without regard for his personal safety his actions prevented Endgame Red, at the time reconstituting from a mass casualty event, from being overrun by enemy infantry. This almost certainly saved the mission from failure.

For throwing quite possibly the best satchel charge fastball.

After setting up demolition charges on several aircraft whilst under heavy fire, Wrench then participated in the assault on the enemy HQ. After which he engaged a helo borne QRF using various improvised explosives to great effect. Damaging the enemy help and driving it off as well as severely attriting the QRF, he was last seen engaging the enemy amongst a hail of gunfire holding the infantry and allowing team mates time to reorg.

CA Wrench planted explosives on all An-2 Colts to destroy tech as the primary mission aim. Additionally, took out a QRF Mi-8 and the squad it had just landed, by throwing by a satchel charge at it, the took it our as it was taking off, causing it to explode and crash down onto the troops it had disembarked.

Best landnav ever

Cpl Morse executed the team's ground insertion flawlessly, navigating at night through jungle and evading several enemy patrols to bring the platoon up to the perimeter fence of the target without being discovered. Her calm and professional land nav ensured that Endgame Red had the element of surprise and were able to interdict the Dorset pilots before they could lift in their Mi-2s to provide air cover. This factor negated a huge risk to EGR and almost certainly saved lives.

Navigated EGR safely to main objective circumventing a number of patrols and enemy positions. Then directed over watch fore to cover the main assault, allowing the assault group to close with key objectives. Through Morse's direction her team successfully nullified much of the objectives defensive positions and QRF, she then aided in the medical treatment of severely wounded marines during their extraction, saving several lives under extreme circumstances.

for some outstanding path finding during the infiltration. and for excellent suppression and elimination of pilots preventing all but the last from making it to enemy air. and them taking it upon them to tank the attention of that helo and keeping it off the rest of the team until it was dealt with.

I would like to commend Morse for excellent land nav on the way to the target, allowing us to get to the target without engaging any outlying patrols

Flew us out of there, after being on the assault team and holding the casualty point while blue team moved in to assist from the hillside.

Gucci participated in the initial assault, stormed the HQ building killing several defenders, then in vicious room to room fighting located the intel. He then defended the aid station from several waves of attackers killing many and extracting wounded team mates to the evacuation help. Without these actions EGR mission may have ended in failure and several more marines would certainly died. Gucci then piloted a captured enemy help and used it's cannon to deny the modified airplanes to the enemy. After doing so he piloted several members of his squad to the allocated exfil site. Gucci behaved with all the best qualities of the service.

Excellent job flying a stolen Mi-2 to get half the squad out.

PFC Gucci flew out the other Hoplite with the rest of EGR aboard. He also faught an extended battle through the airfeild's central buildings to find the vital intelligence the squad had been sent to retrieve.

Morning Mom

I figured I’d write this one quickly before I hit my bunk. Now I know what you’re going to say, why am I about to go to bed after I just said good morning to you, but we just got back from a night mission. Can’t say where we were, nor exactly what we were doing, it was one of those, but I’ll fill you in as much as I can.

We travelled to the AO in a C-123, which I think is perhaps the noisiest plane I’ve ever been in. It’s a good job we were parachuting in, because if that thing had been anywhere near the target there’d’ve been no chance of any element of surprise. Anyway, at our designated point, we all jumped out, and enjoyed the peace and quiet for a moment before steering our parachutes east towards the target. Thankfully there was a large river we could use for navigation, and enough of a moon to be able to keep track of our LZ and each other on the way down. Sadly, the winds were not in our favour, and we had to coordinate a second LZ in mid-air, but Staff picked a landmark that really stood out, so we all managed to rally up without anyone getting lost.

I was leading Blue Squad, and since we’d been guarding the eastern end of the rally point, we got to lead the team off into the jungle. Sarge (that’s Mattock, not Radical. It’s confusing I know, I’ve just about trained myself to call Radical Staff now we have a Sarge, but of course I then immediately started calling Sarge Staff too, or Sir. I’m sure I’ve called Staff Sir too in the past, but I think I have so far managed not to call any of the Officers Sarge, which I think is the better way round).

Sorry, minor digression there.

Sarge was with Blue, and he and Burgerboy had some fancy new tech which I probably shouldn’t talk about, other than to say it was a great use in combat despite it being dark. That left me and Beltfed doing it the old fashioned way as we started to hike. Unlike most hikes I’ve been on since I became a Marine, this one was mostly quiet. It wasn’t until we got close to the target that we started to see lights of vehicles on patrols, and what we think were campfires of static guard positions. We had to do some crawling on our bellies once we were really close, at one point it was a crawl all the way through a gap in some rocks to break any possible line of sight, but we kept discipline and made it to the outskirts of the airfield without anyone noticing us.

While I can’t say exactly what we were there to do, I’ll say simply that we had to steal some plans and blow up some planes. Now with the target being an airfield, there were a lot of planes, but fortunately we had Mr Scatter Sir with us to point out the ones we were actually there to attack. Also fortunately, they were parked up in front of the base offices, the most likely place for the plans to be stored. Praise Darkon.

By this stage we were starting to see their emplaced machine gun and such, but they hadn’t seen us yet, so we kept sneaking through the trees until finally one guard tower did spot us and we had to take it down. Thankfully, it took a while for the whole base to realise what was going on so we managed to get much further down towards our objectives before the alarm was actually raised. Once it was, things got kinetic very quickly. Yellow pushed down into the target area, while Blue stayed in the tree line to take out the machine gunners covering the area Yellow would need to run though. My gun is useless at that sort of range,but I do now have a pair of binoculars, so I stayed on my belly on the grass and directed fire instead.

It took us a little longer than I’d hoped to take out all the visible targets, but we still managed it pretty rapidly, and when they turned to shoot back at us it meant they weren’t shooting at Yellow as they breached. From the radio traffic there were plenty of others who were though and so Burgerboy and Chapman went down to backup Yellow, leaving me and Beltfed on overwatch. She was super effective, me? Less so. She took the control tower we had previously engaged and used it as a fire base, which worked really well until almost the entire airfield’s garrison decided that they didn’t want to run towards the main assault across the runway in the open, but skirt round instead, leaving her facing off against several dozen troops.

One thing I did manage to do though, was spot a bunch of enemy pilots trying to make a run for their planes and helicopters, and call fire onto them to stop them from taking off and either raising the alarm, escaping with the target aircraft, or doing gun runs on us. One got in a helo and took off, so as soon as it started firing near Yellow and fired my little peashooter at it and that was enough to distract it from them onto me.

I know what you’re going to say, and what Dad will say, and everyone else, but if it was shooting into a dark treeline at me, it wasn’t shooting at Yellow. Darkon must have been with me, because the hillside was exploding all around, but I escaped with only minor shrapnel wounds from both passes it made. I’m not sure what happened to it in the end, I suspect it bugged out, but I lost track of it and realised I’d not heard from Beltfed in a while so went to check on her, and that’s when I saw the masses surrounding the tower she’d been in.

I took a few of them out, called it in, and Sarge arrived with Burgerboy to deal with the rest. I was once again the distraction, and this time their fire was much more accurate than the pilot’s. I’m afraid to say that I suspect I was close to making the ultimate sacrifice on that hillside, but we pulled through. By this point I’d also seen Wrench working on the target aircraft, he’s the one that carries explosives, so I’m sure your guess as to exactly what he was doing is likely to be correct. That was before the whole Beltfed issue, so should probably be higher up in this account, but things got very hectic and so I’m mentioning them as they come to me.

I wish I could tell you more about the heroics of the breaching team, but I’m afraid I just wasn’t there to see it. Once Beltfed was recovered by Sarge and Burgerboy though, I crawled my way towards the centre of the action as well. By this point there had been a plan to steal one of the target planes to make our escape in, but unfortunately it turned out not to have enough room for all of us, so that plan was abandoned. There had also been a QRF helicopter with a large number of hostile infantry in it, but Wrench still had a satchel charge spare, so he threw it at them from a rooftop and took it out as it was taking off, causing it to crash onto the troops it had just dropped off.

By this point we were all back together on the apron, that’s the bit in front of the tower on an airfield where the planes stand ready for use. We had two or three people down at this point, and a couple of machine gun towers trying to up that count. I was working on Clapman and Beltfed, while Mr Scatter Sir stole one of the armed helicopters and went to try and take out the towers. Sarge then went to steal another, and we loaded Clapman, Beltfed, and Misstep into it, with me taking the last seat to medic them as Sarge flew us out. The evac was a bit hectic, with having to split ourselves on the fly between helios. I thought Burgerboy had the last one, but turns out it was Gucci, and Mr Scatter Sir’s helicopter had taken significant damage, making it very hard for him to keep it in the air at all.

Misstep didn’t make it, his heart gave out shortly after we took off and I just couldn’t get him back, so I focused on Clapman and Beltfed as Mattock did a few passes over the field to cover the third helo. Then we all flew away as quickly as possible. Our helicopter took it low and fast through the river valley we’d seen during the parachute drop, and Mr Scatter Sir must have done something similar as we landed by his burning wreck and got picked up in friendly helos from the same place. Gucci’s helicopter... well, I have no idea what they did, but they were back at base before me and the two casualties. Mattock was last though, as he hadn’t boarded the evac helo as he wanted to play the captured on back. Someone evidently talked him out of it though as he arrived back in another marine helo shortly after the base medics got Clapman and Beltfed back on their feet.

So there you go. A mission in the dark, that I can’t really talk specifics about. We lost two marines though, as Wrench didn’t make it either. Beers in their memory will be tonight, after we’ve slept.

Love to all

Morse