Operation Flashpoint: Day One, Unwinding.

The evening went slightly better than expected: the Soviets didn't attack the town, but they did ambush and kill our lieutenant as he was driving unescorted, in an unarmored Jeep, from the town up to the village where we built that secondary base. (They appear to understand what's going on almost as well as I do.) So orders came in to pile into an APC and relieve him -- I was yelling at the game that this was absolutely idiotic, but I don't think my microphone was hooked up.

Let's pause for a moment for a tactical exercise. Let's postulate this map:


..\..FFFFFFFFF
...\..FFFFFFFF
FFFF!F.FFFFFFF
FFF..\..FFF../
FFFFF.\...../.
FFFF...\....|.
........\...|.
.........\./..
..........*...


This more or less reproduces the conditions of the ambush, at least if you play ADOM. (And you should.) The lieutenant drove from the asterisk in the lower right of the map (the town where we were relaxing for the evening) to the exclamation mark in the upper left, a grove of trees that come right up to the road on either side, where he was ambushed and killed. He did call for help after he was ambushed, but his transmission was cut off with a burst of AK-47 fire, which is a pretty convincing argument in my mind.

So, suppose you have one M113 of troops (8 men plus the M113's driver and gunner), and you have to defeat the ambush at the upper-left point. (Another point I'd forgotten: the grove is on a rise in the ground, and thus has a clear line of sight a long ways down the road towards the town.) Do you:

A. Take the road directly from the town to the ambush site, stopping your motor-Cuisinart (footnote below) in full view of the enemy to unload troops, hoping that its .50-cal machinegun will keep the enemy surpressed and that they don't have any RPGs, and then have the troops advance in a skirmish line with the M113 driving on ahead?

B. Unload your troops on the eaves of the forest, have them work their way through (incidentally surprising and destroying from behind any secondary ambush securing the Soviet right flank and further threatening the road), and then hit them with the M113 from the main road once the troops engage the ambushers from the forest?

Both approaches have the disadvantage that you lose the lieutenant (and in fairness, the second road is a lot further off, and the forest is larger, than I've drawn it above), but one of them has the advantage that you don't also lose the relief forces. I'll let you guess which one is better, and I'll let you guess which one SACSTUPIDUR actually took.

In a fortuitous mistake, I got turned around as I exited the M113 and carefully advanced in the wrong direction until I realized the action was the other way. Before I was close enough to engage, we had come over a small dip in broad daylight (well, it was the evening) and taken three casualties out of seven men, including the commander. The M113 dashed up cavalierly (I swear it was flourishing its plumed hat!) to save the day, got its gunner shot (he has a gunshield, but it only faces forward -- little use if he's fired on from right and left at the same time), and was knocked out by an RPG. Shortly afterward, we lost our second in command, who had taken over from the commander.

But by that time, I had managed to advance into the western copse of trees (the F just west of the exclamation mark on the map). There were four, maybe five Soviets there; I killed two of them as I advanced, and was helped fighting the others by fire from the surviving friendlies (which was particularly helpful when I was reloading). I was pinned down, but pinned down two Soviets as well -- killing one as he tried to move southeast to flank me, and then locating another by his shadow cast through a tree (the joys of old graphics engines!) and shooting him through the tree, before he could take up his new position. I had a longer duel with a third Russian, but killed him, and we enjoyed a brief lull after that (I'd been wounded, but fortunately the medic was still alive). Fighting picked up intensity shortly afterward; we were now past the copse, and I turned back when I saw a soldier in the woods southwest of it. I practically got within bayonet range of one man -- really, if I'd had a bayonet and a "lunge" button, I would have used that instead of firing a (less reliable) burst at him, and the winner of that fight was the one (me, in this case) with the faster reaction time -- and then killed a second one. By this point a second M113 of troops had arrived; they disembarked and started advancing towards us, and I opened fire on them -- though I should have realized that a mass of eight troops advancing slowly in line were probably not more defending Russians. They had more hitpoints than the Russians, I think, but I managed to kill one of them before their commander came on the radio directing me to cease fire: skirmish-line doctrine is there purely to protect against fratricide incidents, but it doesn't work even there. (If I'd had a Goldeneye-type grenade launcher I would probably have wiped out the whole squad.) We had lost another man, and the three survivors of my squad were amalgamated into the other one; there was a little more fighting, in which they took more casualties. (I was off on the periphery, and didn't get the chance to engage.) A truck arrived shortly after to pick us up and bring us back to base; there were only seven men who boarded, including one who literally had to crawl up to the bed of the truck, having been shot in both legs.

Total survivors: nine men (counting the two in the second APC, who I think survived) out of twenty engaged. (Twenty-one if you count the lieutenant.) By the usual measure of "casualties" denoting wounded as well as killed, I think we had fourteen casualties out of twenty troops. I killed five Russians in the battle, and my squad lost five men; had I not been there, the numbers would have been even worse.

Tomorrow, we're assaulting a Russian-held town from the north, northeast, and northwest, once again in M113s (although this time there's enough clearing around it that there's no easily-used forest we're ignoring, and the lay of the ground means that the enemy will have a small perfectly clear field of fire, instead of effortlessly commanding the whole approach to the objective). What fun! (Did I mention I'm playing this game on easy difficulty yet?)


Footnote:

M113s are hideously vulnerable to RPG fire. Their aluminum armor, chosen for light weight, is heavy enough for defense against most small arms, but when struck by an RPG's shaped-charge warhead, it spalls, releasing red-hot shrapnel into the -- very crowded -- interior of the vehicle. Troops in Vietnam who saw what RPGs did to M113s generally rode on top of the vehicle instead of inside it; some enterprising units even rigged up controls so that the driver could sit on the roof, as well.