Dear Mom
Sorry about the lack of a letter yesterday, but we were out in the field, and I didn’t get the chance to write. We’re back at base now though and relaxing, safe in the knowledge that the big guns of the artillery park are watching over us. We’re still up at Dak Pek, and I think our Terp is enjoying having more of his own people about to chat with. It’s doing wonders for international cooperation as well, as he always takes a load of the lads over each night to socialise with his cousins. They’re a really friendly bunch these particular Chelts! Our camps here aren’t anything like anything at home mind, so don’t try and picture Fort Adams in a jungle. I wish it was Fort Adams in the jungle mind, but we’d probably be the ones who had to lug all the stone, so there’s arguments both ways.
As I was saying though, we were out in the field yesterday, although I had some equipment issues as we were about to set out, so had to catch up later after a lift from a passing loach (that’s a small observation helicopter). Finding the squad in the jungle after being dropped off was a little spicy, as apparently my little grease gun doesn’t make a loud enough sound when fired for the squad to hear and direct me.(It was shot specifically for them to hear and work out a direction from, don’t worry). I was close enough to hear their radio comms, and Mr Scatter Sir was with them, so we just used our big radios to work out an RV, while everyone else got on with things on the squad radio.
The LT was apparently off doing LT things, so the Sarge gave me Mr Scatter Sir to look after for a bit, and to his credit I only found him bleeding out in a bush once! He wasn’t too bad though, and spent most of his time talking to the Colonel who was up giving us air cover in a helo for a while. I know you’ll be very surprised when I say we were heading uphill, but the mission was to take a specific hill and hold it long enough to get a rebroadcast station up on it, so I can’t really say I was surprised. That’s basically a giant radio mast to improve our comms by the way, a /giant/ radio mast. More on that later though.
As unsurprising as going uphill was, we were also bounced by a Chelt patrol. I actually saw some of them though, which makes a change, and managed to get a couple of grenades into one concentration of them which solved that particular problem. I then had to give Blunderbuss some spare mags as he’d used most of his where as since I was late I hadn’t. He has the big anti-tank weaponry though, so I’ll happily help him out as much as I can. We called in resupply and then started getting shot by a recoilless rifle (not fun), so had to keep track of where the supplies were likely to land, as well as assaulting where we were getting hit from. It got a bit messy, with some of the squad not realising what was hitting us and running across open ground.
We had to med-evac Blunderbuss out as he was hit hard, but base sent us some FNG called Slump to fill the hole in the squad until he gets back on his feet. Because of this, Sarge moved the squads round a little and I ended up in charge of Blue team, which was the heavy gunners who were carrying even more gear than me, so for once I didn’t feel like the slowest person around. Also, the resup plane was hit by AA and went down, but we got the supplies and patched everyone up while Mr Scatter Sir reported the downed plane’s location back to base and got a helo sent in to see what they could find. It’s a bit weird to see that sort of SAR ops from the ground, when we’ve recently been doing that work ourselves, but no two days are ever the same in the jungle. We were pretty close to where we needed the radio mast, but the equipment for it was going to be brought in by a heavy lift helo, so we turned to go deal with that AA site, and see if any of the crew needed rescuing.
I was now with RDX, who reminds me so much of my old buddy Torpex that I sometimes say the wrong name. She doesn’t seem to mind though, thankfully, or it could be embarrassing. Also in the squad was Goat, who has a big machine gun, and then Overkill. I’m not sure why he’s with us, he’s a good engineer, but has specialist training on the M-29, which we don’t have deployed with us (thankfully). He has all the protective gear for it, and insists on wearing out in the jungle with us. Makes him easy to pick out when doing a headcount mind. If you’re not sure what the M-29 is, picture the recoilless rifles I keep mentioning, then add a small nuclear warhead on the end, and then you’ll understand why I don’t want to be near one.
We stepped off to the south, where we could still see the smoke plume of the crash, and in short order came across some hostile Chelt on top of a rock. They were armed with... actually I’m not sure exactly what the big guns they had were, I was kept busy with the ones with rifles trying to block our way, while other members of the squad dealt with the hardpoint itself. Once we all met up at the top Torp RDX blew up the big gun and we continued on, as it wasn’t the AA gun we’d been looking for. Not that it took us long to find said other location though, they just sadly saw us coming and we had a hell of a fight to get close. They were on some solid rock sticking out of the jungle floor, and had surrounded themselves with traps, so when we tried to push we were not only getting shot at, but also getting hit with ranks of punji spikes. I hate punji spikes. Sarge hates punji spikes. Everyone hates punji spikes.
Happy that that was what we’d been looking for, we went north again, not quite retracing our steps, but broadly it was back the way we’d come. Thankfully we went across the hills, cos there were two armed Chelt vehicles hiding in a little valley to ambush us, but we appeared on the cliffs above them, not the path they were watching, and I dropped another grenade on top of them as others fired. Would have been really nasty, but we ambushed them instead, and so only had to deal with a few Chelt infantry that were supporting them. We nearly lost Morris though, and it was only the quick thinking of Disco that saved him. After that it was a short push up to the hill we’d been sent to secure, where we dug in, called for the mast, and then, unsurprisingly, got attacked.
We dug in on the flanks, and the resup pilot that Mr Scatter had found was picked up and taken back to base, then things got serious. At first they were attacking up hill across some nice open ground, so Mr Scatter Sir called in some mortars to dissuade them. As an aside I think Warthog, our firebase, like him more than me, they never give him airburst ranging shots. Maybe you could send me some syrup so I can make coffee milk for them? That might get me back up in their rankings.
With their initial line of approach having met the good news of our artillery they tried from other routes and we had to keep moving round to push them back, then, as night fell, they attacked with two tanks. If we’d still had Blunderbuss with us we’d’ve been in a better position, but as he was back at base with the medics we had to make do. Rain tried to tunnel under one I think, and we all had a go at shooting them, but then Mr Scatter Sir called in some air support. I’m assuming that’s what killed the first one, but I’m not sure, it’s a bit of a blur. The second one though, I helped with. I’d just put some red smoke on it as a marker for the aircraft, then Mr Scatter Sir got shot, so I had to clear the plane in for its attack. I’m in no way qualified for that mind, but I’ve heard him do it, and everything was already ready, so I figured I’d go for it, and it worked. Their two tanks were down, and they gave one last push from I think the north. Helpfully, the airforce told me that they had enough for one attack run, so I vectored them onto the attacking Chelt and they killed about 30 of them for us, turning the attack. All we had to do then was tend the wounded and hunker down until dawn.
As I’m sure you can understand, I am a little tired now, so I’ll leave this letter there for now.
Morse