Operation Yard Tiger

Dear Mom

I just wanted to say that while I started my last letter complaining about how wet it is here in The Delta, I didn’t mention the main positive of being stationed here. Not everything is a hill! There are still a few about, but it’s less unrelenting, and we can just assume that any hill we see has some form of long range hostile gun on it and send our air support to check it out before we get close.

Today, in fact, involved no hills at all! It did involve being attacked though. Multiple times. So I guess we can’t get everything we want.

I think I mentioned at the end of my last letter that we’d just done a foot patrol to Patrol Base Juujuu and that we then took over as its garrison. We’d hoped that the patrol had rooted out all the hostile forces in the area, but I’m afraid it seems more like we’d just made them all very angry. They did at least give us time to work out where everything was before attacking though, so there’s that.

I started off by trying to pre-calculate a few locations I thought we might need to call mortars in if we were attacked. We didn’t really use them, the points that is, the mortars we used a lot, but that’s for later. They weren’t a style we’ve used before, and for a while we couldn’t work out some of the finer details, but we got there about half way through the attack. Before that though it was rifles, grenades, and whatever Rumble’s big tube that fires explosives is.

The first wave came in from the north, the area I was helping cover. They did a lot of that, and also a lot of coming through the buildings in the village to our south. Fortunately, we were able to ascertain that there were no civilians there any more, but we couldn’t confirm that til later on and it hampered our responses somewhat until we knew we could attack back without harming civilians. That attack was somewhat brutal as they used cover to repeatedly throw grenades through the firing slots in our bunkers. They also had some sort of rocket artillery that kept hitting the north east corner of the base. That in particular would turn out to be a long running problem for us, even with air support doing what they could to get rid of it for us.

We were in the process of forming a team to go rescue one of said air support pilots who’d been attacking that area when the base was assaulted from the village. Fortunately the pilot managed to self rescue or we would have been spread very thinly. That direction turned out to be as much of a bugbear for Blue as the northern end did for Yellow. Almost everything we faced all day came from one of those two.

Sporadic attacks occurred as we continued to hunt for the artillery that was hitting us. We tried many things, and I have to be honest and say I still don’t know what actually killed it, but we saw it burnt out later on, so something worked. We did eventually get our mortars to work though, well LaFreak did, and after a brief period of confusion where he was trying to talk me onto one target while I was trying to hit another, we formed an impromptu mortar team and started helping out.

From this point on I lost most of my situational awareness as I was looking down the mortar sight for most of the rest of the attacks. If you just assume constant attacks from either the north or south west on going between and during the key points I do remember then you won’t go too far wrong.

We spent a while attacking what I thought were two targets, but turned out to be the same weapons truck. We definitely got close with the mortars, if not get some hits, but Rumble and her bloop tube managed some excellent ranging before Mr Scatter Sir crashed and we had to go find him. He was conscious when he went to ground, but unfortunately landed in the middle of a group of Chelt. As we sprinted across a paddyfield to get to him we came under fire. I tried to mark the weapon for the remaining air support, but it turns out I can’t throw a smoke grenade quite far enough. Guess I need to work on that. We got him back though, or we got him up and then a helicopter came to pick him up leaving us to get back across the paddy field ourselves. We didn’t get brassed up on the way though, so perhaps the red smoke mark did work.

Blue Team did an excellent job holding the base while we were gone, but the wire was breached just as we got back. It took a while to clear out the last of the stragglers, and as soon as we had a machine gun opened up on us, but that's the way it is out here.

It then went back to a back and forth between mass attacks from the south west and heavy weapon attacks from the north. We got air support back and mortared what we could. LeFreak and I apparently took out a bunch of armoured vehicles, which was nice. The winner has to be Rumble though, who took out a tank! It was initially too far for her to shoot, and the mortars couldn’t really hurt it, but we could annoy it enough to come out into the open at which point she triple tapped it and it didn’t bother us any more.

Mr Scatter Sir had crashed again at this mount, but he made it back to us without us having to leave the wire and spent the rest of the fight with us in the base. It meant we lost our spotter for the mortars, but I suspect it was harder for him having to talk his Air Force buddies onto targets without being able to mark them with smoke.

Then it went from normal chaos to full on chaos chaos as something they had took out our mortars and then they made a massive push through an orchard to our south east. I can’t claim to really have any understanding of the end of the fight. There was heavy gun fire and shells, I think Mr Scatter’s friends and Rumble dealt with most of it, but I ate a lot of dirt and got shot at from a lot of directions all at once.

I don’t know if we killed them all, or if those who were left just didn’t feel like fighting us anymore, but eventually the attacks stopped and we had time to breathe again. Fingers crossed they’re not just waiting for dark, but I need to go and get my head down for a bit, just in case they are.

Give my best to all

Morse

SATAN 3-4 - An A7-D Corsair II with 12xCBU-75 SADEYE, 7 x CBU-24, 8 x HE-Frag Zuni and 1 x AIM-9 Sidewinder. Dropped a lot of CBU-24 on the treeline north of JuuJuu, Zunis on three separate vehicles, and was shot down before could use the SADEYE. Chute observed, AFAC called in SAR, pilot extracted.

SUNDOG - A-4 Skyhawk returning to carrier with half a load of Hydra. Unable to use since the targets were flak and pilot unwilling to dive straight at them in Hydra range.

WACO 3-0 - F-4 Phantom in gunfighter config with Vulcan gunpods. Strafed a lot of stuff until guns dry.

GREASEMONKEY - Beloved AH-1 Cobra, held off a company-strength unit of irregulars attacking from the South West with rockets and 50 cal.

OVERSPEED IN DIVE - 2 losses, 1 near miss
LOSS OF AIRSPEED - 1 loss, 3 near miss
MAPREADING - 2 near miss