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Writer
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: San Diego
Posts: 36
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WWIII: Read it
This is a slightly futuristic war story, obviously the strategy employed is unrealistic, as the number of LRP books I have read totals to one. Definitions of the combat-type acronyms are listed at the bottom of the screen. Just read it, I guess. Keep in mind it is fiction, and pretty innacurate fiction at that. Except where the weapons are concerned. I hope.
WWIII
Explosions rocked the German landscape as artillery rounds thundered all around Fillmore and his men.
‘Get us off this rock!’ One of the men, probably Strubaker, screamed to the RTO that was desperately trying to reach HQ on his radio. The RTO, Robert Simond, was the newest member of the team, having only gotten into the reformed LRP’s, a special division of rangers, a few weeks ago. This was his first real mission, and it was not going at all well. The whumping of the friendly grenade launchers on the Car15's and the explosions from the enemy artillery made it hard to communicate with his own team members, let alone the commanding officer.
‘This is Fillmore’s squad to HQ, do you hear me?’ he yelled into the receiver, forgetting the teams’ callsign. Simond strained his ears for any type of answer or acknowledgement from Headquarters, but the background noise, which probably should have been called foreground noise because it was so deafening, drowned out any noise the radio might have made. Simond cursed and threw down the receiver.
‘God,’ He thought frantically, ‘I’m just a newbie! What’re they doing letting a cherry handle the radio?’
‘Sergeant,’ He screamed over the artillery to the team leader, ‘Sergeant Fillmore!’
Fillmore pivoted on his knee, turning to see who had called for him.
‘Over here!’
He spotted Simond and walked, hunched over, towards him. He was there in a second; reloading his weapon while asking what was wrong.
‘Sir, it’s the radio, I can’t hear—‘
A mortar round struck about five meters away, causing Simond and Fillmore to dive to the ground. Simond quickly felt his body for broken bones or wet spots, then grabbed the radio receiver and sat back up.
‘Sergeant, I can’t hear what’s being said over the radio!’
Fillmore looked at him as though he were stupid.
‘Try using the headphones!’
Simond looked at the radio on his back and, sure enough, there were a pair of headphones hanging on the side. God, he felt like such an idiot. All these things had been addressed in training! He grabbed them and clapped them over his ears as Fillmore ran back to the fighting men. The effect was instantaneous. Immediately the sounds of the fighting turned into a quiet, steady drone, and he could hear the command loud and clear.
‘—your location?’ The voice came over the radio. Simond quickly mashed down the talk button on the receiver.
‘Repeat, over.’
There was silence for a moment, and then the radio crackled to life.
‘What’s your location, over?’
‘We’re about a mile east of the LZ, I’m pinging our location right now! Over’
Simond grabbed the handheld GPS device and checked the LCD display. He mashed down a green button and held the transmitter in the air. There was silence on the radio for a moment, then sounds of typing.
‘We’re sending a chopper to you right now; ETA, five minutes. Hang in there, men! Over.’
Simond yanked off the headphones.
‘Five minutes!’ He screamed to the men, holding up his left hand, fingers spread out. He grabbed his M16 and whumped a round in the direction of the artillery. Simond couldn’t actually see any Germans, but he could tell from the sound of the Artillery fire and the sniper rounds pinging off the dirt mound in front of them that they were very close, probably under a mile away. The landscape around the men was sparse in the winter climate, only bushes and a few dead trees.
Farther away, however, where the Germans all seemed to be, there was a full-blown forest of evergreens and dead trees. The snipers must have been hiding in the branches, Simond figured, because the grenades hitting the ground didn’t seem to be lessening the enemy fire very much at all. He reached into his a pocket on his Kevlar vest and pulled out a pair of binoculars. It was time to start thinking outside the box. The young RTO pulled off the cover and peered through the lenses, focusing them on the first row of trees a half-kilometer in front of them. Then he angled them upwards, just above the trees, and focused them on something past the first couple rows of forest. He could see the tips of the artillery units that were firing on them.
Simond grabbed the GPS device and folded out a screen displaying a digital map of the area. He set it down on the snow in front of him and grabbed the radio receiver and headphones. He clapped the headphones on, but kept the microphone lowered.
‘Sergeant Fillmore! I need to show you something!’
Fillmore turned around, impatience etched all over his face.
‘What?’
He crawled over to Simond, sliding the safety back on his gun.
‘Look through these,’ He said, handing Fillmore the binoculars, ‘look just above the tree line directly in front of us. You’ll see some artillery.’
The sergeant squinted through the binoculars, focusing on where Simond pointed. His eyes widened as he saw the columns rising above the tree line.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘radio it in.’
As he turned back to join the other men, Simond called after him.
‘Sir!’
‘What?’ He turned around, more patiently than the last time.
‘Tell the others to fire their grenades at the tops of the trees! That’s where all the snipers are.’
Fillmore squinted at the treetops.
‘By Gawd, you’re right! Men, fire at the top branches of the trees.’
Simond pulled the microphone up to his mouth and mashed down the talk button.
‘Fillmore’s squad to HQ, we’ve spotted artillery and we’re requesting counter-artillery, bombers, or gunships to take them out, over.’
‘Give us the location of the artillery, over’
Simond grabbed the GPS device and, using the track-ball mounted on the side, moved the display on the screen about a kilometer to their north. Then he slipped an electronic stylus pen out of its notch on the bottom of the device and marked the approximate location of the artillery on the screen.
‘I just pinged it, over.’
There was silence on the other end for a moment.
‘Okay, we’re sending two bombers over for an airstrike. Your chopper should be arriving in a minute or so, over.’
Sure enough, the steady whup, whup, whup of the rotors could be heard in under a minute. Good thing, too. Simond desperately wanted to get out of there before the enemy artillery found its mark. The grey Black Hawk glided over the men, and a ladder dropped down the side.
‘God,’ Simond thought, ‘I don’t want to go up a ladder with all that sniper fire!’
But he grabbed on anyway, after Fillmore and Strubaker. It felt like he weighed a million pounds, it felt like his arms were turning to putty. Just when he thought he was going to fall, a pair of hands reached over the side and pulled him up into the chopper. The rest of the men scrambled in after him, as though a forty-foot climb up a flexible ladder was an everyday routine. The crew chief gunner pulled up the ladder, and the Huey took off, sniper fire pinging off its sides. No one talked, not much could be heard over the sound of the chopper’s engine. All the men where just too glad to be out of there alive. Instead of speaking, they tried to relax, feeling the wind in their faces and watching the snowy German countryside go by under them. Simond was shaking.
‘This is what I volunteered for, I suppose.’ He thought.
ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival
HQ: Head Quarters
LRP: Long Range Patrol
LZ: Landing Zone
RTO: Radio Telephone Operator
Well, that's all. Tell me what you think/if I should continue it.
P.S. I'm well aware it doesn't mention all the men or Simond's life story. The idea is if people like this, then this story may be added onto, and that will be adressed in the next part.
__________________
They say you can’t be hip,
But I don’t care what they say,
The thing I got’s cold blooded,
And I’m coming from a brand new place,
I’m dealing quick and I don’t miss a lick and I better don’t leave no trace. -James Brown
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