Operation Midnight Dove

Dear Mom

We’ve been posted to an area known as The Delta. I’m told that’s because it’s a big river delta, but all I can say it’s it must be a very big river indeed as no matter how far we patrol we’re still in it.There are midges, mosquitos, and dirty water everywhere (on that note, can you send more socks? It’s a nightmare keeping them dry). One of the other marines in the battalion is from the south, and said it’s just like this along the Mississippi, so I don’t think I’ll ever go there.

First mission back was a foot patrol. Sometimes they’re okay, sometimes they suck, this was kinda a mix of the two. They let us ride a helicopter to Patrol Base Rhona, but we were on foot from there to Patrol Base Juujuu. Distance wise it wasn’t too far, but it was island hopping, with us having to hope that vague reports of improvised bridges were true. More on that later. We weren’t alone though, we did have air cover in the form of Mr Scatter Sir in something that sounded mostly like a lawnmower.

We set off to the north east through some dried reeds or long grass or something, and it didn’t take long before we took contact. We have another RO with us at the moment, so he went with Yellow Squad and I stayed with Blue. It got a bit kinetic as we call it, and Mr Scatter Sir was shot down, but he was good enough to crash right by us so we just had to wade through CS gas to get him, not volleys of gun fire. That came later. We got him into his rescue helicopter and went back to our patrol.

A little while later we took fire from the some spider holes in the river bank. It ended up being more protracted than we’d hoped as our air cover wasn’t back on station yet, but I got to take out a recoilless rifle, so that was helpful for the squad. At some point in this fight Yellow found and cleared a bunker, and Mr Scatter Sir crashed again, but I was busy at the time and have to say I missed it all.

We called in resupply and while we waited the squad got hammered by another recoilless up on a hillside. This time it was our resupply plane that killed it, sadly by crashing into it after being shot down, but it was very effective. By this point we’d been told by air that there was no bridge here, so we commandeered a local boat and used it to ferry everyone across to save having to swim in the water, and started on island two.

It wasn’t a big island, and there was an actual bridge off it this time, but it turns out that Chelty can understand that bridges are important and it was defended. I didn’t see a lot of what happened, there were loads of reeds and bushes in the way, but someone dealt with it and we started to cross. It was at this point I found how hard those bridges are to get on if you’re in the shallows, and also if there are reeds covering the end from the land, but I don’t think too many people saw me wallowing around like a beached whale trying to get onto the planks.

Unfortunately, by this point, someone had been too close to the water and we didn’t have enough full canteens to flush their systems so we had to divert to a small village called Ap Lang Cat where Sunray had organised for water to be delivered by road. Mr Scatter Sir flew overhead and marked our route with smoke for us, but a friendly mortar team from Rhonda mistook one of his smoke marks for one of theirs and bombarded the area, Fortunately it was far enough from both us and the village that it’s just obliterated some reeds rather than damage anything important. We made it to the village and the food and water, then stayed long enough to call in a full resupply drop as well as a few people were short of bullets.

While we waited Mr Scatter Sir tried to see if he could land on the road as if it were a runway, which provided a degree of amusement, and an equal degree of dread from those of us watching.

We got intel from the water man regarding some form of rocket launcher system to the north (we needed to head east), and so when we set off we initially went a bit south as well, skirting round another nearby village as we did so. A confused report came in about a lone hostile on a rock though and wires got crossed in terms of where they were. Turns out they were a spotter for the rockets and we probably should have left them alone, but that link wasn’t made and we diverted north to deal with them. Needless to say, the rockets weren’t pleasant to deal with, and we had to call in air support to do so as they were on top of a rocky hill across a large open area from us. I’m not sure how long it took, but air hit it repeatedly and a medical helicopter landed to patch us all back up.

With that threat removed we continued along the road to the east. This would lead us directly to the village that our patrol base was just north of. It was going well until someone started taking pot shots at our air cover from near a large rocky hill, so we diverted to try and deal with it. It wasn’t much of a diversion distance wise, but there was a lot of confusion with smoke being flown to mark targets for air, and even more confusion with some of our squad having pale helmet covers which through smoke look very like Chelt hats.

I won’t lie, I lost track of exactly where we were and exactly where the hostiles that had been spotted in a nearby farm were, but we just kept pushing and the world broadly exploded around us for a while. Then we cleared the compound in our usual style, and only a few of us were briefly on fire. Don’t worry too much about that though Mom, it’s not as bad as it sounds as long as you remember to stop, drop, and roll. The LT was out of bullets again, so we called another resupply while a cobra covered us, then made our final push to the base.

We nearly had an incident where the cobra was sent in to attack some hostiles in the trees, but fortunately the other RO put some smoke down to mark our position and the strike was called off as we were much closer to the hostiles than air had realised. Deciding to avoid the town entirely we took a somewhat wider bridge this time, the crossing only spoiled by another miscommunication leading to Yellow team making a sprint for the wire while Blue was still being mediced several hundred metres behind.

We made it though, despite the base’s mortar team doing their best to explode us instead of the hostile force that attacked us on the way in. Words might have been had, but it worked out in the end.

I have to leave it here for now though, as we’ve got to take up the job of guarding this base. Hopefully we’ve already dealt with the threats in the area and it’ll be a relaxing posting. Either way, I’ll let you know next letter.

Morse

This evening's cocktail was a Socialite.