Mom
There’s something in the water round here at the moment, a few of the squad have come down with it, and lets just say the rest of us are avoiding the medical tent for a while. Docs say they’ll be fine, but Dear Darkon the rest of us are staying clear. We think they picked it up on the last mission, we’ve had to do a fair amount of river swimming in the past week or so, but the.. ah.. issues only started yesterday.
So why were we swimming across a river? Well, we weren’t at first. We started out by assaulting a hilltop position. The artillery had allegedly softened it up a bit for us before we went in, and there were definitely craters around, but I don’t think the Chelt defenders were feeling particularly suppressed.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. We started off with being given a lift to the AO (that’s Area of Operations) in a helo, and I grabbed the door gunner seat so I could leap out once on the ground and avoid a repeat of last mission. I know I’ve said it before, but there’s some lovely scenery here, it’s just spoiled by the heat, the mugginess, the mosquitos, the people shooting at us, whatever is in the rivers, and the fact that we have to climb up so much of it. We got to the LZ with minimal trouble though, just one set of ground fire as we crossed over a strategic bridge.
Our landing zone was quiet though, just a few civilians who didn’t get in the way, and for once we were mostly walking on a level, there’d just be a small climb at the very end. Firstly, my plan worked, and I was one of the first out. I didn’t celebrate too loudly though, or the Sarge would’ve taken the piss, and rightly so to be fair. I think it’s going to take a while before I live that one down. We had a few hundred metres of running along a road in the rain and then it was trees. We might have been running flat, but it was flat along the contour of a slope, so one foot was always higher than the other. You know, a Brit I once met on R&R told me that haggises (haggi?) those weird scottish things anyway, apparently they spend a lot of time with the same problem because Scotland is very hilly, and there’s some that have the left legs shorter than the right, and some the other way round, meaning they have to go round hills one way, and it’s not good to breed the differing types with each other. I didn’t catch why, but I guess it’s good to know if anyone back home fancies farming them. Not that we have the hills for them really I think.
I couldn’t dwell on how to solve that problem for long though, as we heard the distinctive sound of a grenade launcher upslope, and Avalanche, or grenadier, was in front. Yellow Team were tasked with dealing with it, which they did in their usual style, while I ran around trying to follow Mr Scatter Sir who was on the ground talking to a huey we had in support. Sarge asked me to buddy with him, and since he’s an important Air Force officer I had to try and keep track of him, and keep him alive. Additionally, the LT was also in the huey, to see how strategic command from above would work, so I was talking to him on one radio, and Mr Scatter Sir next to me was talking to his pilot on another. Somewhat duplicated effort in the end, but did mean we had two means of comms with the helo, which is always a nice redundancy.
We took contact again very shortly after, with the heavy gunners letting rip into one bunch who were downslope, while also taking fire from upslope. Everyone else moved in to support them, and with the fire from the vicinity of the base we were attacking we swapped to move east (up slope), where of course we found more hostiles. We were just about done clearing them when we saw green smoke, which they use to mark targets for their artillery, so we ran like the wind to get away from it. At some point here, Mr Scatter Sir went down, but because of the artillery smoke I couldn’t go back to find him. Thankfully Blue Squad found him for me so we didn’t piss off the Air Force too much. We tangled with them a few more times, and found some explosive traps that they’d set for us along the way, but our new(ish) pointman, Misstep, managed to find us a safe way though.
Once we were through that we were really close to the base, and things got real kinetic real fast. They had a bunch of machine gun nests, some of which our helo had managed to deal with, but a bunch it hadn’t, and it had had to go off station to rearm and refuel. We had spider holes to deal with, RPGs, tripwires, and then artillery, so whatever was at the base they really didn’t want us getting. That or they were just that scared of us. We got low, rode out the artillery until they started walking it onto us, as then we manoeuvred clear and pushed the assault under smoke cover. We punched a hole through the defences into the centre of the base, but then all the outlying defenders we didn’t meet came back in to give us a hard time, and since we only had one medic it was a very hard time indeed and we lost a couple of people before the medic could get to them. Good people.
Hitchcock, the medic, worked like hell, with Mr Scatter Sir kept the gunship active suppressing and destroying enemy positions. We were running low on supplies though, and had to call in an airdrop. Sounds easy enough, but the wind can be unpredictable, and we rely on the accuracy of the guy in the back of the plane when he drops the crates, so there’s always a bit of yomping amount to find the damn things once they’re on the ground. This time they weren’t too far, and thankfully not by a hostile machine gun, but they did landright by some punjis which really hurt. We got them back to the others though, and we slowly started to win the fight. As no one had found it yet I went to hunt for the intel we’d been sent to retrieve. It took a while, as it’d been buried amongst other things, but I found it, and once people were patched up we were good to go.
There was some confusion at that point, because the LT up in the helo called for a med-evac helicopter, even though we didn’t need it, but I guess it’s better to have them than not to, We got a transport helicopter after that though, and headed back to base to deliver the files I’d found. Turns out what was in those files was the locations of some supply caches, and since we still had all our gear command decided to give us a load more ammo and grenades and send us straight back out again, before anyone had time to move them.
The first supply cache was on a small hill under a bunch of trees. I know, shocking isn’t it. Tree covered hills, in Cheltnam, who knew? The Sarge took us up to the ridgeline away from the suspected location, then we proceeded along it so as not to come at them from the direction they’d be expecting. Or, I assume that’s why, didn’t really seem like the time to ask for specifics. It was a good plan though, and while we did meet some armed resistance, including a vehicle with a machine gun, it didn’t take long for us to overwhelm them and destroy their equipment.
Where’s the river though? I know you’re thinking, it has been conspicuous in its absence so far I know, but I promise you I’m coming to that.
Back in the helo again, someone else nicked the gun seat, but I made sure I was out sharpish anyway. There’d been no easy LZ for the second location, so we ended up half way up a hill and across a river from it. No way to avoid the swim as it itself was on an island, so we were all getting our feet wet no matter what. Well, apart from the LT who was still up in the huey. His feet stayed dry. I’d say ‘as is proper for an officer’ but Mr Scatter Sir, the Air Force Officer, was down in the water with us. Weird I know, but if you try to make sense of this war you’ll go mad, so I focused on getting the mission done and not getting the Captain killed.
We set off from the LZ with yellow in the lead. Technically, while I’m usually blue, this time I was Green, but we were generally more with blue than yellow. Generally. We ended up at the back either way, as we yomped up a small, but rather steep hill, only to find a fortified bunker on top of it. It was overlooking the river, not our approach, so it could have been worse, but it took some ferocious fighting to pacify it, and by the time we had it taken, some large guns in the valley below had noticed and had us pinned. Yellow team went crawling to try and find us a safe route down to the river where those guns couldn’t see us, while Potshot (our marksman) and Avalanche (our grenadier) tried to take it out. I think Mr Scatter Sir was trying to vector the helo onto it too. Avalanche got there first though, and we could hear it exploding in the distance.
Once we’d made it to the river it was time for the first swim. This one was across a small tributary to where we could then swim the main river over to a large island, which had a village on it. The cache we were after was then on a much smaller island by the village. Unfortunately, the huey had long since reported the village as being enemy held and garrisoned. We think it was here that LCpl Slump picked up whatever it is he then shared about, and as we made the swim to the island the huey went in on some attack runs to soften up the village defenders for us. I think they dealt with the worst of it, but we still met with stiff resistance, including some rather unsporting use of molotovs. Our final push was then across to the smaller island to mop us the last of the resistance and destroy the supplies. That wasn’t the end of the swimming of course, there was no suitable LZ on the island, so we had to go back, but we were then on our way back to base where we could quarantine the afflicted.
Hopefully they’re back on their feet soon, for everyone’s sake, and I hope everyone is healthy and well back home.
Until next time
Morse