Stories of the MineSweepers
By,
Relarius
Entry 0
In the year 2014 the balance of power in the world was overthrown by the dreaded beginning of World War III. In 2017 the United States of America, overcome with infighting and economic turmoil, devolves into a communistic police state in order to exude complete control over the countries now limited natural resources and put down the new rebel movement looking to take power from the now all encompassing government. It worked. By October 9th, 2017 all rebel movements were exterminated and all surviving rebels were moved to national prisons across the country. Now the United States faced only one problem with the rebels: what to do with them.
Since the country was already on incredibly small rations there was little that they could move around without outright starving their civilians, and with the war reaching its height they couldn't afford to disband or stop supplying their troops. Soon though, great thinker and known communist supporter, Alfred Heisner, came up with a solution to these new problems. He simply suggested that if they wished to live and be fed they had to work for it, and since the country has had a recent shortage of able bodied soldiers why not have the average rebels take the jobs to dangerous to risk the enlisted and put the rebel thinkers to work on how to do it? The government took to this idea instantly and on November 23rd, 2017 the Productive Malcontent and Undesirable Act, or PMU Act, was passed requiring criminals to work for their food and lodging.
By 2018 the United States of America, with its new forced labor force, was making a comeback and was pushing back the newly formed Eastern Allies and taking the fight directly to their founding nation Papua New Guinea. The new MineSweeper unit, composed entirely of convicts, mainly ex-rebels, helped the United States of America and its armies push deep into hostile territory with minimal losses to its enlisted men and women. The new MineSweeper unit, seeing as it was composed of rebellious convicts, was given an entire armed unit of overseers as well as a new and effective system designed by their own ex-comrades to help them find more mines using the equally new system.
This new system entailed a grid with a maximum land coverage of twenty four by thirty yards squared. Each square on the grid was a scaled down image of a square yard. It also had a minimum setting which displayed a nine by nine squared grid just like the other one with all of the individual squares being the equivalent of a square yard. With this system not only could they learn to use the equipment more easily but they could also divide up the tasks of the members of a certain group to more effectively cover what ever area they needed to. Their was even a advance squad assembled for especially hilly and mountainous terrain. They used a more advanced program and went through more rigorous and extensive training to be able to use it effectively.
Once they had enough people equipped and trained to make a proper sized team they sent them into the field almost immediately. This squad took on more assignments than any that were to come after it, securing its place as one of the most effective MineSweeper units of their time. Other squads were put together more slowly and carefully considering the mission requirements and the skills of the individuals that would be within them. At the peak of their use there were several hundred MineSweeper units and thousands of men and women to use them.
MineSweeper units saw widespread use in the war across all borders, knowing no boundaries. The lives of several thousand men and women were cut short or turned upside down during the course of duty. Some went insane, some went rouge, some would just lay down and die. Since the government no longer saw the men and women of these units as citizens, or even people, they were never equipped with dog-tags, recorders, or cameras. All they got were trackers which monitored both their location and their vitals. That way if they attempted to escape or died it would be easily found out and they could be hunted down or replaced. But some of the people found their own ways to record what happened to them. Some kept record of what went on either in the form of short notes or personal journals. These are those stories.