No Holodrama

I've done a lot of things I'm proud of during this war. I guess that's just my lot in life as a commando. It only makes it worse that I'm a squad leader; that I have to be the one who orders the soldiers to perform such deplorable acts, or the one who orders them to their deaths.

I remember that when I was a kid, I used to love those war holodramas where the courageous captain lead his troops to a great victory against impossible odds, against the dirty, evil Bad Guys, without losing even one man. How I wish it were really like that; it's a good day when we come back from a mission with only one casualty.

I think I lost the naiveté imposed by those holodramas on my first real mission. We were supposed to raid an installation where they were keeping the plans to some new super-weapon. We were dropped three kilometers from the installation, and waded through two kilometers of swamp and a third kilometer of bog to get there. I'm still not sure what the difference is. Every so often our squad leader would signal us to get down because someone thought they heard the hum of repulsorlifts or the whine of thrusters. We would squat down in the muck so that only our heads were poking out of the brackish sludge just enough to breathe until the captain signaled that it was okay to move again. One of the guys told me about these parasites that lived in swamps and attached themselves to your legs and sucked all the blood out of you. I was almost more afraid of them than I was of the enemy.

When we reached the installation dawn was only a few hours off; the sky was already starting to brighten. The captain told us we would have to camp out in the bog and wait for night, and we did, all the while with sentries watching to make sure the soldiers stationed at the installation hadn't spotted us.

The installation itself looked like nothing more than a large bunker. It reminded me of the bridge of a star destroyer from the front, but with out the huge shield generators. The end with the entrance was about twice as wide as the back; it would have been the top of the bridge.

As evening set in we took our places. Four soldiers would remain outside to snipe from the bog at any soldiers who tried to attack us while we approached the bunker, which was at the center of a large clearing. The rest of us would enter the bunker, deal with any resistance encountered, and take the elevators in the narrow end of the building down into the actual complex, where we would split into three groups of three, each with their own specific task. I was in the group that was supposed to secure our escape.

As soon as the sky was dark we moved. The nine of us that would be entering the installation rushed out of the bog as soon as the snipers had all fired off a shot, taking down three enemies and injuring a fourth in a matter of seconds. As we hurried towards the entrance, I could see a number of troops on the roof of the bunker take aim at us, their gleaming armor making them more visible in the dark. They had the advantage here; their helmets had night vision and motion sensors built in. The captain had given us orders before hand to ignore anyone who tried to stop us from anywhere other than directly in front of us, and to leave them to the snipers. Our trust was rewarded, and the soldiers on the roof went down before they could get off more than a few shots. A man on my left went down. As I hurried by I told myself that he had just tripped, that he hadn't been shot.

The captain threw a thermal detonator ahead of us at the entrance to the bunker, and it went off just as several more troops came hurrying through it, killing them and damaging the blast doors so that they wouldn't close. We burst through the doors firing, and several soldiers went down. I guess we took them a little bit by surprise, because they hesitated for a moment before returning fire. Another one of ours went down, and the last of the enemy troops that weren't standing behind the blast shield at the other end of the bunker went down. The captain shouted something I didn't hear, but the others started to move back out of the bunker and I followed suit. As soon as we were out the captain tossed another detonator into the bunker, and before it even exploded we were rushing back in. The explosion killed several troopers, and gave us enough of a distraction to rush up to the blast shield and get around it, opening up on the remaining soldiers. The elevators were now right in front of us, but as we moved towards them one opened and four more soldiers came through. We mowed them down before the doors were even open all the way.

Once we were on the elevators we assessed the situation very quickly. Both of our casualties had been from the same sub-squad, leaving only one of that squad alive. Quick changes were made, and one of the men from the captain's group switched to the depleted one.

The elevator doors opened and we piled out, weapons at the ready. The elevators were at the end of a corridor. Stepping off of them you had to take an immediate right, go down the corridor, and take another right. Then you were in the main complex. Even before we reached the end of the corridor blaster bolts sizzled through the air in front of us, burning pockmarks into the wall. One of the men threw a detonator around the corner, and we heard the enemy shout and panic.

We rounded the corner as soon as the explosion went off, firing as we went. In a matter of moments there weren't any enemies standing in the room, and we split off into our sub-squads. Mine went charging off across the room towards the corridor on the far side. It would supposedly take us to the vehicle hanger. The captain's squad headed down a corridor on our right. Their mission was to capture the plans to the weapon. The remaining squad went back into the corridor we had just left, to destroy the elevators.

Before we even made it to the end of the corridor more guards came at us. We gunned them down as we ran, and burst into the hanger looking for more soldiers. We didn't see any, but the man on my right went down with a smoking hole in his chest, and a hail of laser fire came down on us. My remaining team mate growled under his breath about auto-cannons, and I just starred at the body of my fallen ally until the still living man jerked me roughly back into the corridor where the auto-cannons couldn't hit us. Carefully, he looked around the corner just enough to note where the cannons where, then pulled back.

Taking off his pack, he pulled out his glow rod and hurled it into the room. The auto-cannons opened up on it, and as soon as they did, he started firing on the auto-cannons. He was a good shot, and the auto cannons were soon destroyed.

He told me to go open the hanger doors while he rigged up the vehicles we'd need. As I ran through the hanger, I noticed that most of the floor space was taken up by speeder bikes, although there were several AT-STs as well. By the time I had the doors open the rest of the team was back, minus one, with stormtroopers bringing up the rear, which my partner blew away with one of the AT-STs. As soon as they were gone, we hopped onto the speeder bikes that my partner had rigged up. Four riderless bikes followed us out; their computers slaved to his. We stopped just long enough to pick up the three surviving snipers, then tore off through the swamp. Even as we raced away we weren't done losing men. One of the bikes crashed into a tree on the way back.

We lost five men on that mission, and as it turned out they died for nothing. The data we had been sent to retrieve had been transferred and erased from the computers nearly a week ago.