The battle of the Hoover Dam wasn't witnessed by Courier Six, Mr House's pivotal player and a legendary gunman of Nevada like a story from a Gronak or Silver Shroud comic; cutting his way through swathes of strangely ominous and yet underpowered enemies. Instead he tucked in the same sandbagged redoubt as the republican brass and watched through a six inches hole atop the largest man made structure that sat across the former USA's west coast; hoping all the while that Caesar didn't lose his patience enough to send a hundred pound shell through the scarcely protected walls of the room he resided within in the case of that very thing happening.
The war came to him and the other residents of the potential mass casualty event via the constant scattershot of reports coming from their short-band radios. They were one of a few key radio relays containing the intelligence & tactical officer class of the NCR army, sitting behind and below in one of the dams viewing platforms. On the other side of the radios speaking to them were the increasingly panicked calls of the republic army writ large.
"Caesar has managed to land hundreds of legionnaries across the river to Camp Forlorn. The top side of their boats are armoured like a wasteland taxi!"
"Cottonwood Cove's heights has been abandoned by our snipers. They're retreating into Novac! We're getting rolled up like a cheap suit...god damn it we can't see a thing now...or where their gonna hit next!" Someone had a slapped a fist on the heavy pre-war metal table. It was one of Oliver's colonel's. The 'pipe with an asshole attached' as he was described by a passing grunt that Veronica had caught wasn't this close to the action. He was off somewhere in some pre-war bunker using whatever wonder tech was there to monitor from afar.
"Legion laser snipers are picking off people up top here! Get some fucking cover on the other side of the bridge from those 1st recon assholes!" This actually caused some uniforms with the bangles and jewellery on them to shift out of the deeper cover of the grain fortress they'd made and peer over the top below.
"It's insane that this is what destroyed the Brotherhood." Veronica said, not that quietly. Better than her saying 'us'. "People standing about shouting orders at each other and smoking cigarettes. Paladins and Elders lead from the front. Guess you can't see anything behind you or around you from there."
Only a paladin could see anything from where they sat now the Courier guessed. Or himself. That was due to either party having the ability to use their old world thermal lens to see through the thick smoke that hadn't just wafted across the battlefield once, but lingered on it; and when it faltered there would be another boom of Caesar's 255m howitzer and the shells it propelled across the dam would explode in a shower of thick grey smoke. His spectrum altered vision was blurred by all the rising and sombre fires beyond the smoke however. The legion had tore through the NCR defences with the high explosives of the world world that they had apparently forsaken the trappings off and left behind burning wreckage across the dam.
The NCR brass had assumed that they would use the cannon if at all possible on the 1st recon snipers. But then the snipers couldn't hit what they couldn't see. Neither could the rest of the army huddled across from them.
Below the NCR command was a day of grey and white with tufts of flames and orange across the bridge. They caught glimpses of the sun baked mojave beyond, but it was as caught by the same embers of orange where there was no overcasting greys and whites. The entire world around them was caught in the war.
The Courier wasn't sure if they could leave since they had their last 'let us into Vegas conversation without a fight'.
The skinny major had appeared there, and on the first call he finally snapped and started barking out orders over a nearby ham radio. Veronica could imagine she could take a fair guess what calling for his MPs "to get their cigarettes and blindfolds ready" meant.
"Every asshole in this army has chicken for liver." He fumed.
"Every asshole in this army just needs to calm down." It another major. Same jewellery. Better attitude it seemed. "They lost two hundred legionnaries crossing that river, several plumes and all without heads in them now. Whatever's left on the other end isn't fit to take Hope. Someone needs to get on the radio and let our boys know that we're winning this fight."
"They won't believe us, even if we would break command rules on chatter." The skinny major replied. "Cowards don't believe in hope. We need to retreat."
"What do you think? Veronica asked the Courier.
"I think Caesar runs out of tricks eventually." He replied. Quietly enough. "Then his legions can try running into gunfire. The NCR are the ones who spew out tens of thousands of rounds every year for their soldiers to piss away shooting into the hills. Now the legions right in front of them. That smoke clears eventually."
"You think they'll win the meat grinder again. NCR punches lasers with their bodies to victory again?"
"I think the army that defeated the brotherhood was twenty times its size. More than four fifths of that army aren't here. But Caesar's troops are here, and some of them might have lasers out there in the grey. If even half of the other rumours I've heard about what Lanius defeated and brought to bear from the east are true..." The Courier shrugged. "Then it's a toss up."
Lanius's rumours did appear, or so they heard. Chariots with their frames coated with the skin of deathclaws and divisions of legion troopers decorated in a slick chrome robot husk skin marched west and east apart, but all together towards the flanks of the NCR lines. The Courier, Veronica and the officers around them seen nothing of it.
Facing them atop the Hoover Dam's battlements came mortor's and gliders throwing bombs and rockets that slammed into dozens of NCR troops and their mangled dead brethren. The Courier felt the roof above them rumble in front of them as the smoke wafted away with the barrage of rockets that made them all hurl themselves to the ground like radroaches. The motorized glider's stuttered on about them and threw bombs until a blizzard of counter fire annihilated their engines in the frenzy.
It was a constant thumping, whistles and then the debris landing around them from the mists beyond. The concussive force and irregular rumbles, groans and screams subdued the Courier as one missile sailed so close to their position that it whistled past like a skimming rock.
The Courier recovered and watched the NCR soldiers run en masse behind the ruin of their first real metal fortification. He couldn't see bodies or limbs or gore; but he did see helmets and rifles and rucksacks littered around the tore up metal. It looked like any wasteland pyre in the ruined metropolis as buildings had been imploded and collapsed by the nuclear tumults. Watching the scene below, he couldn't imagine the scope of the NCR army before this point, or not in his minds eye. His travel in had been in the middle of the night as they passed all the heaps of material and multi-prong multi-staged tenting of the NCR army. For the most it had threats and numbers on a page. Beneath him was an army that could have one hundred and fifty men run for their lives and fall into hundreds before that he could see. There were hundreds behind them as peering heads underneath rusted helmets. Their muzzles pointed to the sky like legion spears atop the broken hills and mounds.
The NCR through the panic of the officers played a trick. They pulled the Base-48 card - a reference he knew nothing off - and as he caught the first sight of the legion advancing hunkered but en masse the NCR played the most ingenius trick he hadn't ever expected of them. Two slabs of metal plating at a mid-point on two shabby towers were ripped down by frantic climbing soldiers amongst the mess of the NCR's final mile long spread of metal ramp works, sheet metal walls and barbed wired that housed their final some three hundred men as a front garrison and those of the prior force that had abandoned their posts.
The Courier and perhaps ninety percent of the older people there didn't understand what was happening until the shrill whirl of pre-war military grade rotary tech began to spin up. The Courier unlike the other ninety had heard it before. He saw the legion between the grey and shivered.
They pre-war turrets that the NCR had managed to hide and now unleash were not the low grade and un-paid security guard stand ins seen around pre-war sites that they'd helped or outright looted on occasion as every wastelander did. You'd need ten of them besides two; then there was the fact and they were all bored into pre-war casings, energy dependent on old world tech and had fired the same bullets that a soldier could. Whatever the NCR had brought made the same frightening and buggy sounds of the truly robotic that the Courier had only faced once and been amongst two of a party of seventeen to survive the encounter.
He expected the several hundred rounds of ammunition that immediately tore through the ranks of the legion using thermal scanners. He expected to see something so once in a lifetime. Instead he heard the mangled screams of the legion forces that had skulked forward as Caesar's own shawl suddenly hid his armies death.
Then there was the rumour that deathclaws themselves had appeared to aid the legion. A whole clutch of matrons appearing behind the lines at Nipton that massacred an NCR supply convoy.
For now in front of him was a cheering NCR army that looked out on what he could just glimpse through the veil; mounds of bodies strewn across the ground they'd just won over the top of NCR bodies massacred behind them.
It was the bloodiest battle that the NCR had fought since they'd stormed the outer reaches of Lost Hills. The Courier thought they'd won. The legion couldn't pick up momentum again, even if he could see a second line rushing behind the first.
Then Veronica said "Jesus christ, is that a MIRV?" and the Courier saw a fully armoured brotherhood paladin hefting a weapon the size of a man across his shoulder. Caesar's cannon boomed again, the paladin exploded to a grey mist and the Courier heard the rattle of the launchers coil snap forward unseen against the the NCR army massed around his feet.
He remembered the M stood for multiple.