This is my own personal recounting of my and my squad's adventures under the service of the Occupation forces of the Combine. This is mostly just for me to collect my thoughts on the matter as a sort of post-action report just for my own therapy - I'd likely get turned into a stalker for the opinions expressed in this book so it's in my best interest to keep this thing hidden.
Well, to start off, I'll give an account of our collective history: Unlike units formed that are just the assortment of Vets and the mentally derranged lumped together, we all served under the same Unit together before and during the war. We served together in New York during the aftermath of the Black Mesa incident helping to retain order: we called it Hell back then but really with the gift of hindsight those early days might as well have been a cakewalk - at least then we could have some semblance of pride in our work when killing off Xenian Fauna that appeared in the city.
We were still in New York when the combine showed up too: we were in the process of being moved to Long Island to conduct burn operations against the rapidly expanded Xenian infestation that was ravaging the place. Instead, we got stuck defending the UN building along with whatever cops and UN Soldiers were at the building when the first ships appeared over the city.
Shit got bad once their soldiers started making landfall: for at least three hours it was just a continuous exchange of gunfire. The NYPD had resorted to setting up ambushes in several of the abandoned embassy buildings outside the UN, along with a large number of resident New Yorkers pitching in and tossing Molotovs down onto the streets from windows and rooftops.
For the most part, their heavy units got slapped hard: most of our cold war munitions which were meant to shred Ivans tanks ripped striders clean in two: I saw one take a Javelin head-on and turn into clumps of shredded cheese, Stingers proved pretty effective against Gunships as well, ripping apart their rear engines and sending them plummeting into the earth.
The problems started to arise when the enemy had more bodies than we had ammunition: That and when they positioned three of the five starships above Manhattan over the UN building: We had been watching in the distance all day those things lighting up the bigger clumps of resistance with a dark matter cannon: ripped entire Tank Companies to atoms I hear.
Needless to say when we got orders that a general order for surrender had been given by the President, the UN Assembly, and NATO we had no choice really but to surrender: we had run out of ammo about a thirty minutes prior and were making use of boobytraps to try and get as many of the synthetics as we could.
After they had stripped everyone of anything that could even resemble a weapon began the executions: anyone who acted defiantly or even might have sneezed funny was shot and then had their bodies burned: back then the Combine had no actual use for mankind and were mostly holding off on slaughtering us wholesale due to the Negotiations occurring.
I hate Breen's guts, the man is a bonafide traitor to the entirety of the human race: but I will give him credit - if it wasn't for his brown-nosing I doubt I'd even be alive to be writing this, I doubt any of us would be alive today.
Once the executions were finished most of the remaining 110th Regiment was bundled in with several other regiments who had survived - guys from the 108th Regiment, 258th Field Artillery, 152nd Engineers, even guys from the 142nd aviation regiment. Just for good measure, several NYPD were shoved into our band of survivors as well.
Mostly the SWAT types were sent in with us: the dumbfuck Traffic meter cops were made into the earliest human combine enforcers alongside the Patrol officer: most of the equipment then was whatever police equipment that hadn't been slagged during the war, only any logo's of the old government were painted over and replaced with the Combines seal of approval.
In the first year we mostly just sat in improvised POW camps: no humans were allowed to guard us at the time yet because the Combine knew if they allowed dissatisfied humans to guard other dissatisfied humans then a revolt would likely break out. This was the situation for about a year until the Captain arrived. Vance, (no actual relations to Anti-Citizen Vance funnily enough.) had convinced Breen to allow for an all-human force to assist in the post-war world to give a "human face" to the occupation forces.
Really it was his way of getting a lot of use out of the POW camps to avoid the fate that was likely coming to us. I found out later that the guys who didn't sign up with Vance's conscripts all got turned into the First Generation of the Transhuman arm: scary shit to think I could have been one of those mooks.
Sure you could call me a traitor to my country and the human race: but I like to think of myself as being more pragmatic to see that ship had long since sailed and sunk. I was just accepting the life jacket coming from the enemy rather than drowning.
Our squad got filled in with a cold Auto Rifleman, stim fueled Combat Engineer, a relatively competent Medic, followed on by a mouthy radio operator, myself the narrating prick, and a Corporal who had supplanted his Sergeant as squad leader during the war.