Hey Mom!
Guess what! The Colonel trusts me enough to put me in charge of a mission! I’m not sure why he said ‘/ah/’ with quite such the emphasis he did when he saw I was the highest ranked marine assembled, but I’m choosing not to think too much into that. The important thing is he gave me the mission command, and we went out into the jungle and got the job done. Our mission was to seek out and destroy hostile bases to the north of San Bay Ban airfield, so we took a couple of armoured vehicles and set out to do just that!
Having noted a potential ambush point on our route we stopped short of it and got to some high ground to see if we could see anything. The hill we climbed was thankfully empty, but across towards the suspected ambush point was a giant gun that tried to ruin our day. With Yellow Team in the lead and Mr Scatter calling in the artillery we smashed it. While our day wasn’t great, theirs was significantly worse, and then Tubular blew it up to make sure they couldn’t sneak back and reman it.
We then headed further along the road, towards the main search area, when the lead vehicle reported a burnt out 113 ahead of them. That’s one of our vehicles, and indeed the lead vehicle was also a 113. With tall grass on either side it was a prime ambush spot, but we had to go check it out in case there were any survivors. Sure enough, as soon as we stopped, some North Chelt started throwing molotovs at us, but fortunately our vehicles took the worst of it, not us. They’re significantly more fire proof than a marine! Clearing them out of the reeds was hard work, but the squad made quick work of it, and then set about repairing the damage to our transport while I spoke to a local. He was on our side, but warned us that there were some people in the nearby village who weren’t, so we changed the plan and went there to root them out, just in case they had one of the bases we were looking for hidden near the village.
Turns out there was a machine gun nest and some other unfriendly fortifications to the south of the village, so we made our way past the civilians and their water buffalo and engaged. We had to be careful because of the farmers, but they very sensibly got their heads down and let us get on with it. I called in for a resupply drop after I thought the worst was done. Turns out there were still a few pockets of resistance, but that just meant we had less time waiting around before we could all grab some fresh mags. A good thing too it turned out, because they started throwing rocket artillery at us just as we got the supplies to the squad!
We weren’t sure where the rockets were coming from at that point (we found them later), but Mr Scatter Sir spotted a hostile mortar team on the flank of the hill I was planning to go towards next, so guess where we went! We drove most of the way, then Tubular marked it with some willy-pete (that’s a special kind of smoke), and we charged up the hill to clear it out. Turns out there was a campsite of theirs up there too, with a bunch of tents, but none of them happened to sleep with a handy map of local fortifications by their bunk, nor books of codes, so we didn’t learn much. There was another small set of buildings just up the road though, so we stayed on the slope of the hill and advanced towards them so we’d have a view from above and hopefully spot any hostile forces there before they saw us. It was a fine idea in theory!
Although, to be fair to myself, I don’t think it was the people in the buildings who shot at us, but the people in the woods behind the buildings instead. We tried initially to get some mortar rounds on them, but by the time we had them roughly ranged the initial elements of the squad were already too close. A situation we find ourselves in fairly frequently, and usually we pull it off, but this time I think we really should have pulled back and let the mortar guys back at base have a go for a bit first. It got a bit ‘spicy’ as we like to say. We cleared the contact eventually though, and pulled to the west to secure a small hill in the hope we might get a good view down onto an area we suspected of being the main base in the area. Sadly, said hill was covered in bamboo so we couldn’t see anything, but it was worth a try.
We remounted the vehicles and started off north to clear another small cluster of buildings, when the lead vehicle reported seeing multiple tanks, so we turned round and went straight back the way we came. Deciding to leave those buildings uncleared we moved instead towards the large clearing surrounded by rocks in the centre of our search area. This was our main suspect for the location of the main hostile force, and we’d been trying to clear out the outlying forces first before the central assault. Things however, rapidly went downhill and the plan fell apart for a bit.
Firstly, those of us pushing to the lip of the area were spotted and the enemy started firing barrages of rockets at us. Mr Scatter Sir took that in hand by calling in some tac-air on their positions while most of the rest of the quad got drawn off to the north having heard engines noises and wanting to eliminate the chance of being hit from behind as we assault. Unfortunately those engine noises were further away than we initially thought, and it turns out we got drawn all the way up to the village with the tanks, only from another direction. We had to call in some attack helicopters to help us extract from that. They somehow managed to destroy the tank on the other side of a tree I was hiding behind, without injuring me, nor further injuring the three marines that were down at my feet. Those pilots saved the squad, no doubt about it. Once the area was pacified we called in more supplies, and made ready to push on the main target.
We encountered a small hostile force as we moved in but it was more of a speedbump than anything more serious. Where we nearly lost it though was we ended up getting split up as we dropped down into the suspect area. We started storming rocks, but not always the same rocks, which, if we hadn’t depleted the forces in the area previously could have been disastrous. Thankfully though, their numbers were low enough, and the squad good enough, that we managed rock after rock, even in our disjointed manner. By this point we had air support from a local squadron, and they were able to spot activity at two rocks we hadn’t cleared yet, but we had a lot of trouble working out which specific rocks they were talking about, so we had to have them mark them with napalm. Usually we use smoke, but we had to make do.
Mopping up the last couple of rocks wasn’t too bad, cos by that point the whole squad was together again, we just had to rein in the enthusiasm of the local air support as they were really very keen to get in on the action, and Mr Scatter had to keep waving them off as we were too close. We did it though, and the Colonel didn’t seem to think it had gone too badly. If the photographer got any shots of me looking heroic I’ll try and forward them on in my next letter for you. Did I mention we had a photographer along with us? Reading abc I don’t think I did, anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to show you some of what I’m doing here, and help you put names to all the faces I keep mentioning.
Bye for now Mom
Morse