Chapter 1: Gabriel's 1st deploy
Year 2022
Iraq dunes 0700:
Private Gabriel Irons and his partner Stan O'Hara, have spotted a Nazi prisoner encampment and scoped it out for over a week straight. Irons on sniper and O'Hara on spotter. Both Irons and O'Hara were stunned to see the encampment was full, holding chambers, gas chambers, and expensive living quarters for the Nazis, and crap covered floors of the prisoners 'living quarters' with dead strewn about.
"Jeep, camo covered on your two O'clock twenty-five klicks and climbing." O'Hara said as a Nazi transport jeep raced toward the encampment.
The jeep was let in without hesitation and stopped with a long slide as the tires slid across the loose gavel.
Quickly after the slide, the canvas was ripped off revealing two to three dozen hostages that were pushed off the back of the truck and hastily sent into a holding chamber that was just a big freight cargo box with no windows and a single door, the size of the whole front side of the cargo box.
As the door was swung open to let the NEH (New Encampment Hostages) in the opening filled with hands, faces, feet, and anything the hostages could fit to try to get out.
The sun was rising quickly in their faces a burst shot was sent into the air subduing the violent hostages and it seemed to remind them who was in charge.
Little did they know, they were being watched! As O'Hara recited the corrections to account for wind, drop and rotation of the earth, Irons took aim. After the corrections, O'Hara counted only a half dozen, heavily armed Nazis. Just as Irons was about to take his first shot of his Army carrier, the sun glinted off his scope. The Nazi forces saw it and began shooting toward their location. With bullets speckling around them, Irons took shots taking three Nazis quickly.
"Three left." Yelled O'Hara
The two with AK47's shot full auto in the pairs area, with bullets sparing all around.
"Where did the third man run to?" Irons commanded while shooting at the two commandos.
Suddenly a mortar blast went off ten feet in front of them.
"Where is he?" yelled O'Hara
"FIND HIM!" Irons shouted, as a second mortar blast goes of sending dirt in the air. With dirt settling, a flash of movement caught Irons' eye.
"Found him," whispers Irons to himself and with a final pull of a trigger the man drops, but with a charge already in the tube he also drops a final shell.
As a plum of smoke came out of the tube they hustled to collect their things and escape from their spot, as Irons took a step toward the camp the shell hit only feet from O'Hara, obliterating his body and covering Irons entire right side with shrapnel.
With his left hand, while being under unimaginable pain, he radioed in his location and state of being. The radio responded.
"Blackhawk on its way, ETA to your location is 30 minutes, Over."
After five minutes Irons had passed out from blood loss and the pain in his right side that sent pulsations feeling like he was being shot again and again.
He woke up and was in an extreme panic believing he was still in the desert. After ripping out all his IV's somebody ran in and tackled him to the floor. With a big crash Irons looks at his right side with blood running on the floor from the stitches being ripped out, where they pieced his side, leg and arm back together. Then he looks up to see Michael J. Stewart, his old buddy from high school. A five foot six inch stocky white guy with brown hair and a goatee.
"What's happen to me? All I can remember is…" Irons ask as he flashes bat to O'Hara's body being blown away to pieces.
"You're one lucky SOB." Michael says "You lived through a mortar blast that should have left you paralyzed or dead."
"It's my fault Stan's dead, I should be dead." Irons says, as he looks at his stitches, soon to be scars.
"You're the one of the toughest man I know Irons. Hey, Irons, you're as tough as iron." laughed Michael while joking with Gabriel "Iron" Irons.
"When is his funeral, Michael?" asks Gabriel sobering Michael.
The nurse put him back into the hospital bed, and put the IV's back into his arm and stitching his right side back together. Gabriel winced in pain. He began tearing up from the death of his comrade. He felt the loss as if it was his fault for O'Hara's death.
"In a few days." Michael replied.