I owe Tom Wolfe some credit for his pioneering work crafting the concept of "the right stuff" for consumption for readers. I strongly recommend adult readers interested in chapter three to read Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff," and parents should search for a Reader's Digest version of the book for their kids. Also, I'd like to give credit to Viscount Lancer for helping me edit the first two chapters.

I don't own the Gundam Universe; I'm just lent a little slice of it. The concept of the right stuff doesn't belong to anyone, even Tom Wolfe, that honor goes to fighter jocks, especially those at the top of the pyramid. I named Kale after a leafy vegetable. Mogadishu, Bogota, Luxembourg City, and Cali are all real places, and the CVA really is the Columbian equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Any resemblance between my drug war and someone else's events, real or fiction, is purely coincidental. Rashid's duel with Kale is loosely based on opening events in the 1982 war between Israel and Syria. Needless to say, mobile-suits saw no action in that war.

Complex warfare

The effect of a gatling barrage to the human body are unspeakable (at least for a PG-rated audience), but luckily, after the second corner, Trowa met a net total of zero shooters around the third turn. WuFei tapped Trowa's shoulder.

"Abdul's feed is coming in," he updated, adding, "our back is secure, the cubicles are ahead. Follow me. Unchecked by marauders, the team broke into a sprint to WuFei's op point adjacent to a defended stairwell.

"I'll set this limpet mine to this wall, and once it blows, Trowa, I want you to hose the rubble," WuFei made it so. Despite the wreckage, the team confidently scaled the remaining twisted metal rails still held in place, though the team could only handle pistols and climb at the same time. Trowa covered the ascent.

"Come up, Trowa, I'll cover you," said Hilde, resting an Oz SMG butt against her shoulder. "Thanks, I'm coming up." As the complex's closed-circuited cameras indicated, the climb was uneventful.

"Here's what's happening, we're approaching a really perilous entrance wall to the Situations Room, and soldiers are holding out in the rooms ahead. We'll need to do a really risky leapfrog maneuver on this one. Duo, I want you to make the opening shot, blowing open the armored Situations Room door with that heavy LAW rocket. It's not tricky, since the door is a straight line from the middle of the hall, and only five doors down. Trowa, when Duo's finished, you're supposed to rake fire across every rock and niche over there. I'll crawl to the first room, and set a small charge to the door. Once that happens, Quatre and Hilde hustle under Trowa's waist-level to avoid being shot- got that, Trowa? Don't shoot below waist-level, and don't even shoot to the left once they move in. Everyone understand the maneuver? Good!"

Duo cradled his LAW, a tube and a rocket, and held the weapon steady around the corner. Without poking his head out, he fingered a shot.

"Awe!"

A most fearsome reply; a battery of heavy ultramodern machine guns barked a symphony down the narrow corridor, coordinated to leave not a square inch around the walls unoccupied by steel or lead. The rocket crossed the distance, but both forearm bones in both of Duo's arms suffered breaks, one hand punctured, and a finger needed stitching.

Regardless, Trowa retaliated full auto. WuFei gave it a count of seven before making his epic crawl maybe three meters down the pass.

At six thousand rounds per minute, Trowa returned the favor to those across the pass, discouraging most, drawing the attention of the intense few. One round nicked his meaty quadriceps, another ricocheted off his multi-barreled reaper, and only one caught a part of his skeleton, fracturing a carpal bone.

All worth it, because WuFei's charge keyed open a room. A following grenade cleared out the occupants. He's in.
Trowa fell back to let his gun cool.

"Duo's vitals are intact?" He asked, sneaking a peak.

"Blood loss could have been much worse, and we've largely got it staunched, but he has a lot of openings. Ten," answered Hilde.

"I have two, one above the elbow, in the back of the arm, best place, and one in the right palm of my right hand, another fortunate place," Trowa said, explaining it's not a priority.
He turned back to barraging.

"Change of plans, Quatre, you're advancing alone."

"I'm going." Trowa operated to Chang's script, shooting from the hip up, as Quatre hustled in a low profile, but by now, the opposition had wised up.

"Ouch!" Quatre made it, trailing a sign that the crossing came at a cost. Trowa radioed WuFei, keeping up the pressure nonetheless.

"Hey, we need something different this time. Chuck an assortment of grenades as Hilde makes a dash."

"When you say go."

So it was. At the signal of four simultaneous explosions, the colonist broke into the room.
Duo, secured to Trowa's back, scurried with Trowa, who provided his own cover, with help from Quatre, maxing out his exhausted mini beam- cannons.

"Good work, Trowa, a security team managed to maneuver behind us, and was moving closer to an ambush when you moved in."

"I figured that was possible, Chang. I'm glad everyone's alright." In defiance, Duo's wounds reopened from the jostling, and Quatre collapsed from patching his own abdomen, while Hilde helped them to the bedroom bunks.

"Going so slow and upright like that, were you hit, Trowa?" He shook his head.

"Yeah, a five-round burst nailed my chest plate, but it held without injury," he responded, closing the damage in his hand, and contemplating the same for this arm.
WuFei, meanwhile, issued a magazine worth of vitriol debate with the security force.

"I only have a few seconds worth of Gat ammo, so what's the plan past the next room?" WuFei considered.

"I think action beats reaction, so support my next leap."
Chang, bringing Hilde to tail him, sprinted to the sound of the rotary spray. Explosion, Explosion, and they're in, but Barton's gun dissipates in lethality.
Trowa utilizes Duo's neglected gun, pockets both Maxwell's and Winner's ammo, and stations himself in a chair.
Both wounded fighters are conscious, and Hilde already handled applying localized anesthetics and ivies, so for the moment, he didn't have to worry about the patients.
He radioed the other group.

"Guys, what's happening?" WuFei Chang's voice addressed the question.

"They're blacking out the cameras, so I guess they figured it out. I rigged an improvised surprise for a secret counter-assault, and I suggest you do the same, because they might be a few minutes away from that. Be sure to wheel our casualties to the bathroom, so fragments won't hit them, and find a good place to wait it out, over."

"Roger that, over." Surprisingly enough, the bunks did wheel, so Trowa followed his friend's advise to the letter, and he also added further protection with the top bunk mattresses to form an improvised natural disaster shelter.

Barton's practice of the universal knowledge of combat-cord snare combined with the easily manipulated grenade fuse offered the "surprise" WuFei suggested.

The offense has stalled, meeting an important requisite for a military blunder.

Trowa Barton made resourceful use of the lull in combat, stoically setting a firm clamp on Quatre Winner's abdomen wound, and mimicking the same treatment on Duo Maxwell's six arm wounds. He also set Duo's broken arms against long combat knives, and set the hand breaks against nail files he removed from multi function utility knives.

He elevated their legs to prevent shock, and had the two pilots drink off the water in their camel packs, to help avoid further dehydration. He had Quatre drink slower, because he wasn't sure what a stomach full of water would do to an abdomen wound. Probably nothing.

He inverted an infusion of blood for both of them, the last two bags, and reapplied the local anesthetics to the wounded areas. Soon, the pain would be serious, especially for Duo, but Trowa wasn't yet convinced his patients were ready for morphine doses. The effect of the sedative might still send them into shock when it slows their hearts.

Although Trowa had lost blood from his injuries, he drew a pint of blood from his own veins, because his friends would still need more. Don't worry; the Gundam pilots have compatible blood types.

Satisfied he'd collected enough, he then ventured to redress their wounds more thoroughly than before, gluing, stitching, and applying an antibiotic cream, bandaging, and wrapping. He also set Duo's bones more correctly than he did before.

"Your vitals are coming back to normal, the both of you," he smiled, "I'm now applying half a pint of my blood for each of you-"
Two separate unusual explosions interrupted from both ends of the hall.

"They just walked into your trashed energy cannons, Quatre. I forgot all about that booby trap function," he observed, estimating the number of casualties.

"No more than ten were injured-"a wide assortment of small arms fire interrupted his summery.

"That would be the inevitable backlash against our theoretical charge at them, following the explosions," he summed up, "they'll only take a few minutes to regroup."

The extreme volley quickly trickled to silence, and Trowa refocused on his medical work.

"As I was saying, your vitals are coming back to normal, so I'll soon be able to relieve your pain, rather than just numb it. Your dressing is complete, and if you'll let me, I'll cover both of your torsos with the only two surgical gowns we brought along- heck of a coincidence."
As soon as this was underway, WuFei called on the radio.

T: "What's up?"

W: "Hilde successfully sneaked to the third door to the right, so we now have a little more surprise over the enemy. I instructed her to stay off the airways, because they can triangulate transmissions. We have a no-show loop set for that room, so we don't have to worry about that. Over."

T: "Roger that, over."
There's some relief.

Minutes Pass Duo and Quatre are sound asleep, pain free, and drinking up two bags each of a saltwater-vitamin solution, half of the medical stock. Trowa silently says a wish for a linkup with WuFei, so he could donate two pints of blood from his complete reservoir. As he's mumbling the wish, he stirs in a packet of Gatorade powder into his water-filled camel pack, and sips it up.

"Footstep trotting. Here it comes." His improvised mine fragments against the lead two invaders, answered by a gang of grenades and other hand-thrown explosives, including hefty delayed- fused demolition charges, satchel charges, and modern variants of claymores.

The first cast came to a near-tragic result: Trowa positioned a large furniture piece in harm's way next to the door, in result, the device landed only a foot away from the hurler when it detonated, causing serious burns. With three dead or injured in the assault, the team fell apart in spontaneous retreat to the hall.

"I have a funny feeling that didn't buy us much time," Trowa mused sleepily, waiting for news of WuFei's episode.

Down the hall

WuFei's battle opened the same way as Trowa's; his grenade/mine slumped two, and the following bombardment matched Barton's experience, but Hilda's sudden move changed the outcome a little bit.

Hearing the explosions, she thrust open the door, kicking a grenade soccer-style with her left foot, as she dropped the occupants of the opposite side of the hall, swiveled, and leveled aim at WuFei's attackers, really getting the drop on them.

WuFei exploits the opening, rushing to the entrance and blasting away.
They covered each other and commandeered the fifth room to the left, completing the leapfrog maneuver gone wrong. Before the opposition could regroup, WuFei took the first turn sniping into the entryway, as Hilda supplied the explosives.

"Trowa, we have the last room down the hall. Are the wounded ready to move? Over."

"That's a negative, Hildie, but I'm rolling to cover your back, over."

"I understand, Trowa. We'll try to rush the power switch for the automatic sentry guns. Once we have it on, Abdul can clear us a way out of here. I'll tell you when to rouse the boys."

"Roger. Ready when you are."