OR2-EP1: Perun Awakens (6)

The matter of three American soldiers suspected of drug trafficking and killing their officer while waiting for a buyer is quickly dropped, and the army's only follow-up investigation is to try and find out the identity of the buyer based on the trio's communication logs. It wouldn't have been a big shot who would have met with them in that small town, but more likely a small-time player doing odd jobs for a big shot. According to the authorities involved, the forensic investigation continues, although most investigators agree that they are unlikely to turn up anything of value.

"Maybe they do this kind of business on the home front; Mexican drug dealers have always been wild." Tom and McNeil talked about the incident suspecting that the three soldiers were originally repeat offenders, and that they may have even enlisted in the army and come to Ukraine to escape punishment under the law, "Not to mention that drug gangs are also rampant almost to the point of lawlessness in those southern states that are close to Mexico ... "

"I think they will always run into some tougher forces."

"They're smart enough not to mess with factions that are fundamentally different from their power." Tom laughed, "If they can't recognize that fact, then they won't be able to hang around in the southern states."

There was no trace of guilt in McNeil's heart, he criticized his actions only in terms of whether or not they were legal, and morality would at some point be put above the law for him. For him, getting these three dregs of society the punishment they deserved was the most important job, he just needed to make sure that the three soldiers who dared to sell drugs on the front line and also killed friendly soldiers were dead, the other problems were not his to solve - that is to say, even if there were other figures from the army involved behind the business, he didn't want to care, out of sight, out of mind. He quickly dismissed these disturbing emotions from his mind and quickly blocked out the events leading up to the drug trafficking incident from his memory. The matter was over, and there was no need to lavish additional attention on it.

Tom's reasons for joining the military were simple; like those youths who lacked the skills to make a living, he thought that joining the military and fighting as a veteran would put him on the dole for a long time so that he wouldn't have to worry about living on the streets for the rest of his life due to lack of work. To this he frankly told McNeil that school was too expensive and that he himself did not have the brains to be able to earn a scholarship, and that the consequence of not being able to afford to go to school was that he could not get a better job. Manual labor positions were of course excepted, but these occupations were too intense and Tom didn't want to make himself a part of the factory.

"There won't be any easy careers now, and there never will be." McNeil stood with Tom in front of the camp gate looking at the snow, a sight that might not disappear until spring or summer, "It's the same everywhere, the laborers and engineers are tired of their work, and no one dares to say that their work is easy. When we went to the city the other day, those soldiers from the industrial cities in the north told me that in their hometowns, some of the women who prostitute themselves are only choosing that path because the factory work is so tiring."

"Alas, times have changed." Tom sighed, "Hopes are getting smaller, and so are the chances."

Ten minutes later, they and a number of other soldiers assembled in the clearing and waited to be paraded by their new commander. These soldiers were the lucky ones who had managed to escape back from the previous rout in the east, and their respective units had been wiped out by the Russians in regiments in the heat of battle, so much so that trying to get them to cobble together into new units according to their original formations was out of the question. Looking at the soldiers standing upright in the snow, McNeil thought of the birch forests. He knew that the U.S. Army was more or less lazy, and now that the flag had changed, the style might have changed as well.

Michael McNeil was somewhat surprised to see the captain, with whom they had already met twice, appear in front of the group. The captain was still listless, with a look of weariness or indifference. The days of being lectured in the hot sun might become another memory that could only exist in history, and the war that the next generation would remember would always be Siberia.

"Honestly, I refused at first; after all, I don't believe that soldiers who would run away from the battlefield can be of any use." The Captain scanned the soldiers in a loose manner, he didn't notice McNeil and Tom standing behind him, "However, orders are orders and we should obey them unconditionally. Since your superiors have decided to put you in my hands, I will try to make sure that you live to see the end of the war and not lie in coffins or urns."

That was easy to say; there were few commanders who could walk away in one piece, not so much the soldiers. Commanders still have the possibility of bargaining with the enemy when captured, soldiers have no such capital, and they are lucky not to be killed on the spot by the enemy. The Geneva Convention was a waste of paper in the eyes of some, and if the American army itself did not abide by it conscientiously, how much less could they expect the enemy, who were even more unscrupulous than they were, to play by the rules.

Then, with the assistance of several other non-commissioned officers, the captain redivided the men according to the composition of a standard company. They established a company headquarters, three infantry platoons, and a weapons platoon, and assigned men to act as commanders from a number of other units whose formations had been abolished as a result of the defeat. McNeil and Tom were divided into the same fire team, the former as assistant machine gunner and the latter as scout. McNeil thought he was better suited to be a scout, and he always thought that fire-support duties were less suited to him. In fact, judging from his last experience in South Africa, he played to greater advantage in combat alone.

The squad leader was Sgt. Javier Salas, a Chicano from Texas. After listening to McNeil, he switched McNeil's and Tom's positions within the fire team. The private who served as machine gunner resented this, but there was nothing he could do about it; there was nothing to blame a soldier who had twice escaped death from Russian encirclement for volunteering to take on tougher assignments (at least reconnaissance meant up close and personal contact with the Russians).

"I heard you escaped from a Russian siege all by yourself." Sergeant Salas had a dark complexion and McNeil sometimes confused him with those of mixed African descent or Indians, "That's pretty lucky, several of my fellow soldiers I know were captured by the Russians and haven't been heard from since."

"Luck is always equal, you see I never used to win the lottery in New England ..."

McNeil respected these non-commissioned officers who fought alongside the soldiers in the basic units, who spent their lives on the battlefield, and whose peers from the military academy had become colonels and even generals, while they had to salute the common officers who were much younger than them. He valued these veterans with rich combat experience, the wisdom of the predecessors was vital for the descendants, and the recruits who were good at learning lessons could take many fewer detours.

After the reorganization of the dispersed soldiers was complete, the army was about to head off to the next area of combat. They will be operating in conjunction with the Ukrainian army, launching an offensive into the eastern region, which is under Russian control. Nominally, this is still a Ukrainian civil war, a war between the Ukrainian authorities and the Union of New Russian Republics in the east, but even laymen understand that the U.S. and Russian armies are the dominant forces in the war. After the Air Force cleared the front lines with drones, the ground forces once again moved forward with confidence, their heavy reliance on drones making McNeil a bit uneasy. It wasn't that McNeil couldn't trust the drones as a weapon of war, but he was worried about the inefficient operators wasting time on unnecessary problems. When these operators controlled the drones with a game-playing mentality to attack funeral processions and school buses halfway across the country, there was a great probability that they would spare the real enemy.

Sitting in the armored vehicle, McNeil was still pondering these questions, the gear he was carrying weighing him down. This level of weight bearing was nothing to McNeil, the army coat and other equipment used to keep him warm wouldn't give him an inch, it was the bitter cold weather itself that really tested their patience and fortitude. Every day, soldiers with frostbite scuttled back to the rear for treatment, and not a few had their fingers and toes frozen off or even had their limbs amputated. The occurrence of such tragedies greatly undermined the morale of the U.S. military, and the new category of PTSD was mostly triggered by witnessing other people become disabled over a long period of time.

"McNeil, tell us a story." There was an uproar for McNeil to talk about coming back from the dead twice.

"It wasn't pleasant." McNeil exhaled a hot breath, "The last time we were ordered by our superiors to assist the Ukrainian army in the defense of a town, but the promised support didn't arrive and the Russians attacked in batches with drones and blew the town to smithereens. The attack happened in the middle of the night, and despite the fact that some people noticed something unusual, the missiles drilled with uncanny precision through the windows and into our makeshift quarters. Many people were reduced to a pile of crumbs without even having a chance to wake up. Then ah, that bullet chased me like a rattlesnake missile, and I ducked into a cellar, all covered with the bodies of other comrades and civilians ..."

All of the above was made up by McNeil, and what really stuck with him was the experience of escorting three drug-trafficking soldiers a few days earlier. He was lucky enough to be picked up in the snow by a soldier near the airport and saved from freezing alive in the snow. Before that, he had been crawling through the snow all night, and it was faith, not physical strength, that supported him all the way ... The stamina had long since run out. By this time, McNeil had to admit that his wonderful performance in the past was directly related to the set after set of external armor equipment that GDI had developed, and in case GDI chose to let its soldiers go to high-risk areas to fight in an unprotected state, even McNeil couldn't tolerate that kind of bad environment.

The deterioration of the climate directly leads to an exponential increase in the risk of exposure to combat in the field, and more casualties would be an unbearable price for the United States to pay. Citizens didn't care where their homeland was going to conduct military operations again; if the losses were minimal, they were happy to support such measures aimed at preserving their hegemony and the existing order; when the losses exceeded the limits of the average person and became sensationalized by the media hype, the anti-war campaigns began. In the end, those guys don't care about how the invaded country is doing, they only care about how many of their soldiers will die in vain. Instead of being anti-war, they are just anti-war loss and anti-defeat. If times change, these people will be the first to wave the flag and demand that the United States strike hard again.

They are just wild dogs that will adopt different tones of barking as the wind changes.

The armored car drove smoothly over the recently cleared road, the dead world still sleeping in the snowfields ahead. Just as jungle combat had prompted the creation of camouflage uniforms, the effects of the new ice age on the army were visible to the naked eye, and the new field uniforms were designed to make it easier for soldiers to fight in the snow. In order to prevent snow blindness from affecting the army's ability to fight, most U.S. soldiers were required to wear sunglasses and face masks into battle, lest yet another waste of space in the field hospitals in the rear be unable to make it to the front lines. Despite the fact that the army provided as much protection as possible, soldiers who knowingly violated the law because of their own risk-taking nature still existed, and without exception they made themselves living fodder for others to point at, with officers always using them as examples of what happens when you don't follow the rules.

The armored car came to an abrupt stop, and the men looked at each other in puzzlement, each seeing disbelief in the other's eyes.

"What's going on?"

"I don't know, I heard that there are armed militias operating in the vicinity, and the chief requested that reconnaissance of the neighborhood be prioritized."

The strategy was the right one. U.S. troops fighting in the Middle East and Afghanistan faced guerrilla and militia attacks from time to time, and they had to secure their surroundings as much as possible before they could continue their advance with confidence and boldness. Drones and satellites can provide an aerial view of the battlefield, but machines can't completely replace people in processing intelligence, and the aggregated results still need to be analyzed by other operators. If one day there is an intelligent system that can automatically recognize the enemy soldiers below and mark them for quick processing, then these operators who always like to desert can also retire with honor.

For the moment, this cannot be done. Assuming enemy identification based on clothing, a spy unit fighting in enemy uniforms could get away with it; if a signal transmitter were implanted in the bodies of all friendly soldiers, not to mention the ethical issues that this would raise (citizens have always been highly wary of this kind of surveillance-like behavior), this would result in the friendly soldier becoming a direct and live target in the eyes of the enemy. Back in the days when McNeil lived, the GDI and NOD Brotherhoods also judged enemy and friend simply by the identification codes in each other's communication signals, and would not go overboard.

McNeil accepted the new orders and reluctantly left the convoy to scout the neighborhood as ordered by his superiors. Ukrainian troops following the U.S. Army as friendlies and de facto servants were attacked nearby by armed militia, and the yelling, suspicious friendlies quickly withdrew from the battlefield and asked the U.S. Army to come to their aid. The war was in the hands of the United States, and American troops would not die for these Ukrainians who couldn't even keep their men in line to defect, but they had to make sure that the Russians didn't take the opportunity to attack in force.

The young soldier climbed up the snow-covered slope, carefully observing the conditions below him to make sure there weren't any enemies before crossing the slope and heading towards the dead bushes on the other side. This would have been a large thicket before, and the onset of winter had turned it into a grave. McNeil guessed, not without malice, that the hermits who lived in seclusion in the mountains to escape modern life might have been happy to pick up these dead branches and return them to their fires. There would be no more hermits, the current wilderness was simply unsuitable for human life, and those who rejected the modern way of life would have no choice but to follow the example of the Eskimos, or they would be the next ice sculpture in the snow.

McNeil stopped moving forward, he stood under a large dead tree and rested for a few minutes before deciding to get up and move on. For God's sake, when this war was over, he was going to emigrate to the southern states, even if it meant he had to deal with Dixie, whom he had always loathed. It wasn't an environment that normal people could adapt to; humanity had survived the New Ice Age for only a decade or so before there had been an inexorable decline, and for the first time, the population had taken a dive. McNeil could imagine what the world would become in the next decade or so, a literal hell on earth that would show no mercy to anyone. The angels blew their trumpets, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse harvested souls across the land, and the humans who had dominated the world with impunity finally got a taste of vengeance from the universe.

The Earth doesn't care about that, it will only be the humans themselves who will become extinct.

There was a body lying in the snow, it was a Russian soldier, McNeil could clearly see the other side's armband, this Russian unit was currently active in the Eastern Ukraine, causing a lot of trouble for the American army and the Ukrainians. The Russians didn't even celebrate Christmas on the same day as them, and that prayer wasn't necessary. McNeil buried the body in snow and circled the neighborhood a few times. He didn't encounter any other Russian soldiers, which was a bit of an anomaly for the ever-bold Russians. There was no telling where the group of Russians that had suddenly appeared halfway across the country a few days ago would choose to attack, perhaps they were just out in groups patrolling or securing the Crimea. The narrow isthmus connecting the Ukrainian plains to the Crimean Peninsula was firmly in the hands of the Russians, and neither the United States nor the Ukraine had the ability to attack the Crimea from here.

While McNeil was still pondering these questions, rockets and missiles suddenly poured onto the highway. The American troops were completely unable to react to the sudden attack, most of the soldiers dodged the first volley thanks to their good training, while those who were too unlucky were soon buried in flames. The whirring of drones continued, and McNeil watched as a drone flew over his head and fired a missile at the highway. The American troops, who had been waiting on the highway for a long time without the cover of their own drones, had become a piece of meat in the eyes of the Russians. Soldiers scattered to the sides of the road and quickly launched counterattacks against the uninvited guests in the air. One drone was shot down by mistake, but more continued to fly unimpeded and search for their next target. One drone spotted McNeil standing in the snow, and the cannon closed in on him in a straight line. McNeil rushes to escape, but there's no way he can outrun the bullets, and he watches as the cannon rips him to shreds. Unexpectedly, the drone suddenly slowed down and gradually descended in a strange position, crashing and exploding a few dozen meters away from McNeil.

The Captain, standing not far away, put a strange pistol back on his belt, raised the machine gun handed to him by a nearby comrade, and continued to attack the moving target in the air. McNeil, who had come back from the dead, couldn't be thankful as he scrambled over to his comrades and picked up his weapon and fired at the drone as well. After the U.S. shot down several drones in quick succession, the Russians ordered the drones to leave the battlefield, perhaps deciding that there was little to be gained by continuing the fight. McNeil hid behind an armored vehicle and pursued with an air-to-air missile launcher, successfully shooting down one of the retreating Russian drones.

The American forces that had suffered the sudden Russian attack had suffered heavy losses, and officers were counting the survivors while junior commanders helped to hastily bury the bodies by the side of the road. It was a natural preservation measure, and if the families of the dead were willing to come and view the remains, they would be able to see the lifelike remains of their loved ones near the battlefield.

"Thanks."

"Not necessary." The Captain still looked drained, "I could actually save a few more people if you had the skills to defend yourself."

That sounded a little harsh to McNeil; the Captain was being sarcastic about his lack of skill. However, he couldn't refute it, even if it was a shame to him. The fact of the matter was that he was unable to utilize his proper fighting skills; Michael McNeil had never even experienced long periods of combat in the bitter cold in his life, his brother Jake McNeil was proficient in those skills.

Tom was still around to assist his comrades in piecing together and stacking the bodies, blown beyond recognition, on the side of the road to await inspection.

"There's nothing we can do to shoot down their drones?"

"No way, what can we do? Drones will just have to be dealt with by drones." Tom sighed, "We used to be able to get around with drones without a care in the world, but then we gradually got caught up. Now even the Russians have the ability to ride over our heads and yell ... obviously they just suffered a defeat last year."

"Hey, our allies are still discussing whether or not to buy the new generation produced in China-"

"... You shut up!"

After taking care of the dead, the convoy hit the road again. They had lost over a hundred soldiers in the Russian surprise attack, and the Russians had paid the price with a few drones. Cost-wise, the costly drones were certainly worth more than the lives of these dead, and the American army's losses were much less than the Russians'. But not all losses can be measured in money, and the very thought and act of treating life as a commodity that can be purchased and valued with money is the greatest blasphemy against humanism.

Another piece of bad news was received only after they had driven into Zaporizhzhia. A brigade of the Ukrainian army was surrounded by a mass of Russian airborne troops near Kherson and was completely wiped out, with only a hundred or so men of the brigade barely surviving. The Ukrainian commander blamed the U.S. side for false command, while the U.S. Army claimed that the Ukrainian Army was not acting in accordance with the NATO charter. In short, the situation doesn't look like it's going to get any better until this blame-shifting argument is over.

TBC

Chapter Notes:

In fact, the widespread use of drones plays an important role in the reality of this Russian-Ukrainian war.

According to the current situation, the eastern territories of Ukraine should be directly annexed by Russia. Nonetheless, nothing similar happened in 2020 when I conceived the story, so the eastern part of Ukraine still exists in the form of puppet states.