Ghost Story
In this army, you have to pack a lot of gear. It usually ends up being about a third of your body weight. You also get lots of time to think, when you're marching. I spend maybe half of it thinking about my girl back home ( she got a nice, safe comission back home directing air traffic, so she does the worrying for both us), and the other half I spend categorizing gear. Category 1: shit I'm glad I'm packing e.g. m-41 assault rifle and as many clips as they'll let me take. Category 2: shit I wish I wasn't packing e.g. M-5 flare gun with six flares. The whole thing weighs about seven pounds. Every squad has to have a guy with a flare gun and it just happens to be me. Category 3: shit I wish I was packing e.g. some smokes that aren't wet and maybe a porno mag or two. Category 4: shit I'm really glad I don't have to pack, e.g. OC-9 scanner, aka. 'the crank.' The OC-9's a gadget that fits over your eyes like a pair of goggles and lets you see a ways into the infrared and ultraviolet. It's also got a zoom, a polarizer, and a bunch of other crap that nobody ever uses. I heard the new ones have radar. I've even heard that they have ones now that will smell for ya. That's just what I've heard. Anyway, every squad's got to have one guy with an OC-9, and since the ghosts have been runnin' around, the guy's got to have it on and active at all times. After an hour you've got a pain between your eyes from wearing that thing; after half a day you've got the worst headache of your life. The painkillers don't make a dent -- the only cure is to wait out your 24 hours with it, or get the lt. to issue an order to turn it off. This order has never been given to my knowledge. That's why it's called 'the crank.'
So this one day, Braithwait was on crank duty which also means
he's on point (another reason to dread crank duty) which consisted of a
lot of standing around and bitching while lt. checked the map. We were at
a fork, and checking the map at a fork is SOP, especially when the fork isn't on the map. The sun was low and we were in a dry creekbed in the shadow of a hill. Normally we would just pick the path that's headed in the direction we are supposed to be going and monitor our coordinates to see if we're getting where we're supposed to be. That won't work out here; we were on steep mountain terrain with trails that wind up and down and all over the place. And the jungle was so think, you couldn't see more than 75 ft in any direction -- including up. Good luck finding a landmark to help you orient. So the lt. ordered hollyford up the hillside a ways to get a a transmission through to command; the radio wasn't working where we were. Hollyford trudged up through the brush carrying the long range radio (definitely cat-4) without a word and the rest of us circled up and rested on some of these big rocks. No sound but guys smoking and talking quietly back and forth and then I heard a pop a ways a way uphill in Hollyford's direction and then another pop much closer. I saw Braithwait spin around and land on the ground in front of me. Everyone grabbed some dirt and I was face-to-face with a dead pvt. Braithwait. There was a hole coming right through his face, and a smaller hole on the back of his head. The scanner had a hole through it and I could see through the hole to darkness where his right eye should have been. Guys around me were yelling "ghost! ghost!" and they were shooting all over the place, but what I was thinking was "now I won't have to do crank duty". This is fucked up, I know, but that's what went through MY head. It was getting dark where we were, and my buddies are shooting left and right and most likely hitting nothing. We were just wasting ammo and the ghosts were out there just waiting for us to finish up.
Ghosts are these enemy guys with nice, expensive rifles and nice, expensive suits which make them virtually invisible. They always travel in small groups and only with other ghosts. There's some special name for 'em but everybody just calls them ghosts. Our side supposedly has ghosts as well, but I've never seen 'em (ha ha, funny guy.) I said 'virtually invisible' because to see them you have to be watching closely and under good conditions. It's easier when they're moving, but in this jungle you spend most of your time looking at the ground, watching your footing. They could have been tracking us all day, keeping their distance so as not to show up on the OC-9 until they were ready to take it out. The crank will let you see the ghosts. Without it, you have to work a lot harder to take out a group of ghosts. Besides the rifle and the suit, ghosts also carry trip-beam traps (definite cat-4, though not because of the weight. I just don't like the idea of guys runnin' around setting up traps. It doesn't seem like an honest way to kill a man. Still, I'm told our sides winning [of course] and if that's true, I guess they got a right to do whatever they think it'll take to get them back in the game. Not like I get to choose or anything -- command seems to think their money is better spent on more grunts than on R&D to counter whatever the other sides cookin' up. Like my good friend Moreno used to say -- " R and D man? WE the fuckin' R and D in this army, man.") They're just like a normal trap, with an explosive and a trigger, except instead of wire they use a laser. The beam's diffuse, maybe four or five inches wide, so a branch or a bird won't set it off. You walking through the beam definitely will. They usually have a delay of a few second, so the guy that tripped it can lead a few more of his buddies by it by the time it goes off. The crank'll pick up the beam from a trap if the spectrum on it's wide enough. Their guys keep upping the frequency on the traps, though, so our guys have to keep widening the spectrum on the cranks to keep us seeing them. The ghosts like 'em because they won't set 'em off as long as their suit is working -- it bends the light right around them and they can run back and forth all day with not a peep from the traps. A trick they sometimes try is to get a squad's attention and fake a malfunction in their suit. They do a little hit-and-run, and get a few guys to follow them into a trapped field. This might seem pretty damn simple, and it is. Guys that have been out here for a while won't go for it. Still, you'd be suprised what guys'll do when they've been harrassed by ghosts for a few days straight, without much sleep, maybe lost a man or two, and they get what they think is an easy chance to nab one of them.
The sarge yelled cease fire about ten times and finally it happened. Then orders came up quick and quiet from the lt. -- cease fire switch to grenades. listen for movement throw in pairs --. Just about the only way to nab a ghost without a scanner is to listen for movement, take a whild shot and hope you got lucky. Throwing grenades in pairs was the lieutenant's idea. I guess he figured we stood a better chance that way. It can work pretty well, especially when you get half a dozen guys all throwing at the same noise. The grenades are light enough -- they're small and round and look like a cherry bomb. Most people call them cherry bombs. I was throwing mine three at a time. Darkness came and we kept listening, and throwing. It's maddening -- being huddled behind a rock, seeing guys get shot at, bullets zinging by you and all you can do is wait for those ghosts to come in closer, make a sound, give you a chance. For a while they were trying to to hit Bennie, our firebat. Every squad's got to have at least one fire guy as well, sometimes more depending on the situation. The ghosts were going for Bennie because they knew if they could get a good shot on one of those tanks on his back, he would light up like a christmas tree and maybe get one or two of his buddies. They give the firebats enhanced armor, but that does them a fuck of a lot of good if they're aiming for the tanks like these guys were. Bennie scrambled to the rear and basically hid. Lt. made no objections. We threw and listened. We threw until we were out and then we just listened. Everything was quiet again. We waited for dawn, and it took a long time to get to us.
In the early morning light, we could see around us. We had bombed the shit out of everything. Nothing moved. We found Hollyford, dead from a shot from a ghost. The radio still worked, though, and guess who got the duty? You guessed it, I carried it for the remainder of our little hike. We got one of the ghosts for sure -- he was flat on his back and definitely dead. There was blood from one, maybe two more that got away. Those ghosts wear almost no armor so they can stay light and quiet. I think we dinged those guys up bad enough to send 'em home. We didn't run into any more ghosts for a week after that, and we joined up with a unit out of Kaitamarou with a medic! They'd seen light duty so far and the medic had plenty of time to take care of our guys. Sarge had a broken rib and internal bleeding from a ghost bullet. It took the medic about five minutes to look him over and give him a shot of that nano-stuff. Whatever they put in there, it sure works. By the next day, sarge was salutin' and yellin' orders like nothing had happened. Jansen lost an eye from a piece of grenade, the medic couldn't do much about that. I wish they would get some more medics out here, but I guess command would rather have a man holding a gun than a bag of medical supplies. Anyway, I made it all the way back to base packing that monster radio the whole way. It got crank duty right away on the mission after that and how was that? It sucked, but I waited out my 24 hours just like everybody else. I heard the lieutentant got into some hot water for letting Bennie run for the rear like that, but the brass must have been impressed with the way he handled that situation, because he got promoted not too long after. Then he got transferred and we got a new lt. fresh from OCS and I never saw that guy again. Man, does this new guy bite it. I'm amazed that I'm still alive after the situations that guy got us into. I'm even more suprised nobody took it upon themselves to 'accidentally' shoot him one day while the sarge was off doing something else. That makes me think of another story, but right now isn't the time. Maybe I'll tell you later.
-The End-
Note: no mention made anywhere of 'splash damage.'