Operation Ignoring Leave

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