Shattered Aegis Flavor

I know you, dear reader, were expecting my wholly needless explanation of how US Army Bradley Platoons and Tank Platoons work, but my judgement got the better of me. At some point a guy has to admit it's been done countless times before by more talented and knowledgeable people and to tell yourself that you can sell a book on Project Rainbow just won't work. The same can be said when fellows like the guys at Armchair General do a much better job at this kind of thing, including things I've made into scenarios for Arma 3.

And since my computer is still down, I'll continue with my project here, because I believe the world of Arma needs more thrilling filling, if you know what I mean (No, not like that you perv). I couldn't ever really get into the single player of the games, which really sucked since it's really the only stuff that can get you into their mindset. I know the majority of it is pseudo special forces stuff and the like, later some guerrilla stuff. Maybe they finally get conventional, but I don't know. Either way Arma's not the story-driven kind of game I want when it comes down to it. But at the same time I find Arma 3's near-future incredibly hard to get into. As part of a regular writing thing I decided to try to plump up the background flavor as much as I could. I played the first mission of the single player for about ten minutes and got to a checkpoint and died shortly after, only to have the save be corrupt and crash my game. I never wanted to boot it back up, however. The rambling background dialogue meandering in a mix of aimless exposition that fills up so much of games these days just wasn't what I wanted to get slowly flown into again.

So I wrote this, straight from the White House War Room or conference room or whatever you want to decide they have in the future.

After TF Aegis was ripped apart, President Connell took a decidedly belligerent stance against the Altian government. Claiming that no such betrayal could go unpunished, he ordered the mobilization of a force to be deployed to subdue and topple the new army-backed government. And by that, I mean POTUS, leader of the free world, slammed his fist onto his desk and then threw his coffee at the nearest aide. And that aide lost his composure and ran from the room and within three hours had leaked word of the outburst.

Now don't get me wrong, the outrage angle's the right one to take on all this. If I'd verbally massaged a guy to a full erection turned and blew the heads off the guys I'd sent over to actually build up that erection, I'd be pissed too. A lot of people believe in the warrior-esque President. Sometimes we want some crazy fucker in that office like Andrew Jackson. But you see, Connell wasn't that fucker. He was the moderate and calm fucker in the room always saying how the pen was mightier than the sword and how a resolution and compromise could be made anywhere with the right motivation.

For a guy like Jackson, the motivation was the ever present threat of a duel or just the thought of a bunch of men with rifles showing up to send you packing across the continent. For Connell, well, this was a hell of a mood swing. And when he called in his advisers, his cabinet, he was all profanity and red in the face, his hands swinging around like he was trying to kill a ghost.

That's not to say he'd lost his mind or anything, guy wasn't about to grab for the football and try to blow the tiny island off the map, but he was pissed. The secretary of the treasury had to dodge a few more miscellanea from the desk, hell, the only guy halfway to where the President was happened to be the secretary of defense. And the two were probably a few steps away from jumping on the bed shouting kill kill I wanna kill before the vice president walked in and almost had a heart attack looking at them.

So let's get it straight, you can't mobilize the whole military to take out one pissant island in the Aegean Sea. There are a number of guys you can send for this kind of thing. We're talking you lead with the black ops guys. Now some say the spooks were there the whole time, but they were busy shoving their dicks into every olive-skinned Greek girl they could get their hands on. Me, I like to have a bit more faith than that, but I think the ouzo got to them. Maybe the hangovers started to wear down their ability to distill the SIGINT down to something usable by the sober boys back in the states or Italy. Or maybe, in some epic feat of faith, the President had actually convinced every agency and branch to leave the allies alone. No tapped wires, no bugged potted plants, awkwardly hacking into dropbox and google drive accounts. I mean, maybe those NSA freaks dove in, but let's say that they didn't take much more than a handful of nude selfies.

But again, I'm off track. Pres says go, we go. He says who can go? We say, well, sir, you see, most of the usual guys are off rotation getting rest after the last tour. And we cast our eyes around the room awkwardly as he asks again, who can go? Well sir, I think there's some elements of a few divisions available. And bam, there you go. Roll all those guys together and send 'em over! And you can't just say no sir, I can't do that. He's your boss's boss's boss's boss. I mean we're talking bigger boss than big boss, no snake scars. So we go and look through the rolls, well guess the two patches here get a free trip to sunny Altis.