Me again Mom
Forgive the handwriting tonight, but I just had to sneak up to a flamethrower tank so I could mark it for airsupport to destroy. I had to get much closer than I wanted to, but I was on a slope beneath it, so it couldn’t depress its barrel low enough to get me. Or I’m telling myself that at least so I can sleep tonight. I can’t really describe the dichotomy of SAR detail. Hours, sometimes days of sorting bolts and shifting rocks, interspaced with short periods of adrenaline fuelled terror. This morning we got the call that an A4 (that’s a Skyhawk, flown by the navy) had gone down and we needed to go find that pilot and bring him home. It’s always a him, so I guess the women pilots just don’t get shot down. Only explanation I can think of.
It was a long flight north in the helo, then our pilot took a while finding an LZ to put us down in, all the while we were taking groundfire. I won’t lie to you Mom, but I thought we were going to be shot down at one point, we were that dinged up by the time we got down in the river valley. We had a good idea where the pilot was though, he was hiding in a narrow gorge, and yes, that means we were jumping up hill to go get him. There was a hostile village between us and him though, so we had to clear that out first, then try and find a path with air assured us they could see, that would take us up. Unfortunately their directions to it were a bit vague, so I was halfway up and doing what I thought was an excellent impression of the mountain goats back home before I got called back down to take the actual path. Might have been better sticking as I was mind, as there was a hostile machine gun post half way up said path, yet no one had been firing on me on my scrambling route.
Once we got up as far as the pilot and parajumpers were hiding we engaged a lot of hostile infantry we had to deal with, but thankfully a load of them were far enough away that our supporting skyraiders could keep their heads down with attack runs. At one point a bunch of them snuck up behind us though, which slowed us down and kept the medics busy. We did eventually get moving back down the hill though, in a sort of rolling retreat, where people stopped to provide cover until everyone was past them, then running down the hill past the next people who’d stopped. It worked okay, until they started hitting us with something heavy. I thought it was a mortar but apparently it was a recoilless rifle, either way though a shot from it hit too close to the pilot we were rescuing and he didn’t make it. We did end up rescuing a different pilot though, as Captain Scatter Sir crashed while taking out the recoilless and Sarge had to haul him out to the jolly green. It was a good thing he did though, cos if that gun had still been active when we took off it could have easily destroyed our helicopter.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned any tanks yet. Yes, tanks plural. They’re still to come, but we did at least get a bit of downtime back at base before the sirens sent us scrambling again.
This time we were sent to the town of Attapeu, where two pilots were in hiding, and in short order, a parajumper joined them as his chute failed to open on the way down. We landed south of the river from the town, and had to choose between swimming the river, or skirting round the long way and crossing a bridge into town from the west. Fortunately we picked to go for a swim, as the air support kept taking continual fire from the west meaning there was likely some sort of military camp there. Unfortunately there was something nasty in the water, and there’s a couple of us feeling distinctly off after being immersed in it.
When we made it out of the water we were a short way to the east of town, and the airforce had already put some ordinance there to clear the way into the town for us. This did include some that was a little closer to us than I’d’ve liked, especially as we didn’t get any warning, but it was far enough away to be okay, and they moved it further away when requested. Bagpipe (I think) killed a hostile truck, but behind it was the flamethrower tank I mentioned earlier. Bagpipe definitely hit that, but didn’t manage to do much to it, so we had to call in air support, and that meant marling it. I was north of the road with Howser, one of our medics, and as we were downslope we could sneak towards it without it being able to see us. I threw one of my red smoke grenades at it and within seconds it was hit by something from the air. It wasn’t enough to kill it though, so we had to remark. That was enough to disable it and RDX, our Seabee, rocked up and stuck a satchel charge on it to make sure.
It was then a case of sweeping through the town to try and find our missing airmen. I won’t lie, town clearance isn’t my strong point, and I quickly lost track of where exactly we were, but thankfully there was one main east west road so as long as we were pushing the right way along that we couldn’t go too far wrong. The Sarge then wanted me to call in a resupply, but thankfully by then I’d worked out where the church was, and called it in on that position. Some might say ‘the Lord Provides’ afterall. What I should have done though was let the airforce boys covering us know it was inbound. For some reason I thought they’d talk to each other but apparently not, as there was almost a mid-air collision. One to remember for next time.
By this point, those who had more of a clue of what was going on had found the aircrew and we started to think about heading home, so of course the Chelt decided that this was the perfect time to send in another tank. It was moving too fast for air to take out before it got amongst us, and it even ran over Avalanche as it tore through us. Mr Scatter Sir tried to take it out and ended up crashing into the cliffs to the north of town, but Mr Kent went to rescue him so he ended up in the chopper with us on the way home for the second time today. Fortunately, one of the Skyraiders, Torrent I think, managed to take out the tank and from then on it was a case of pulling back through the town to the helo as a few Chelt on foot tried to stop us.
All told we rescued two of the three pilots we were dispatched to today, and then Snuffy and Mr Scatter Sir twice, so I guess that goes down as a win, and I’ll take all of those I can get.
I hope the winter isn’t too harsh this year
Morse