Impulse's East Wind Tales

[Impulse]

As many of you know, I am a three-year veteran of Operation East Wind, a week-long milsim event that takes place annually in the central US. The event meshes operational planning and skillful execution with historically
correct equipment and techniques to create a top-notch airsoft/reenactment blended event, providing 24-hour-a-day immersion for up to 9 days at an affordable cost to the attendee. It's truly an unbeatable experience that comes with my fullest recommendation for anyone out there with the ability to schedule vacation time away from work, family, and sweethearts - a narrow slice of the milsim community to be sure.



I have been asked about East Wind experiences at events before, but the scale of the event means that the stories are considerably longer. Combine this with the fact that I am not much of an orator, and you end up with a lot of stories that are never told. Well, I feel I am decent at writing, and need to get warmed up for working on a story for some video game project that I'm attached to, so I feel this is an adequate way to get warmed up. So, for those that haven't been able to attend, and don't see the day coming where they will make the trip, I offer you the opportunity to live vicariously through my experiences in these slices of East Wind lore.




Story 1: Clobberin' time
East Wind 7, Early Week

East Wind's storyline is often a perfect example of a situation escalating out of control. The world situation is drawn up with careful references to actual events and training exercises from the Cold War, applying a slight "What
if?" twist to give us the opportunity to get trigger time. The event takes place in the time period between 1988-1992 - an especially volatile part of history which also has the benefit of providing a wide variety of
easy-to-find military surplus items. The escalation of the world situation is often tied in nicely with a ramping-up of operations for both companies as they finish setting up equipment and complete preliminary training missions to build familiarity with their unit and the terrain. This graduates into reconnaissance and ambush missions and finally into direct action over the course of the week - but there is always the possibility for the situation to be upended early on and everyone thrown, unprepared, into combat.



It's adequate to say that this happened this year. The deterioration of inter-German relations (in the backstory) led to a NATO push to secure our border town of Cottbus and evacuate its civilian populace to the airfield north across the border. This brazen advance over the border was considered not welcome, but unfortunately for us in 7 POTA camp, we were not aware of the severity of their move.

Grenztruppen (Border Troops) alerted us midday Tuesday to a NATO presence approaching the 'Pegasus' bridge, a primary avenue through our territory. Sensing that this was the spearheading unit for a potential attack on our headquarters, command called up our Mot. Shutzen section to blunt their advance.

I can't exactly recall what we were doing at the time, but I'm betting that there was someone complaining about how we'd been in the field over three days and hadn't seen any action yet, and I was probably trying to draw up motivation to run some battle drills and local patrols while we had the chance. The order came through, and within a few minutes we had our full strength loaded into the Romur. Eight AK type rifles, myself with the RPK, Jennings with the PKM, I can't recall if Shortround had the RPG (wasn't needed in this mission), we certainly had a force that would impress the hell out of your run of the mill airsofter.



The enemy, however, wasn't to be taken lightly either.

Curfman raced us down the access highway to a five-way junction that marked access to the field proper, where we dismounted our four-man security team and made tracks for the contested Pegasus bridge. Our point guard consisted of myself and three rookies - at least two of which, I've learned, had never been to any major airsoft event. Grimly acknowledging my role in the conscript horde, I put our team into a split column and moved off down the road faster than I'd like. (The driver had an itchy foot on the gas, and rushed us dismounts along.)

We got lucky, and made it the first 150m without issue, the Romur following at a reasonable 50m gap. Halfway along we made contact with a retreating Grenzer patrol (Master Chef and Komatsu) on the left side; I vaulted a low concrete pipe to glean any information from them, but learned nothing more than a vauge "They're up there." This was foreboding knowledge, but did not change our plan, so we moved on. We were approaching a split in the road, at the beginning of the 'SME Valley' which runs the length of the field, and about 80m from the bridge that we were tasked to secure. The reasonable thing to do at this point was to dismount the rest of the section, set an overwatch element at the top of the gorge with the RPK, sweep the area for contacts, and finally dig in a defensive circle and report back so the friendly units undoubtably rushing to secure our flanks would not waltz in and blast our poor conscripts.



Given time and authority, that would be my course of action. I split my element into pairs tasked to each side of the fork and looked back to the Romur to see if they were still putting up the highway or in the process of dismounting. I saw nothing happening back there, so I figured we would set down, send a messenger back for reinforcements, and proceed with the previously mentioned plan. When suddenly, "Kontakt!". (Or perhaps it was "Contact!", I could not tell if they were yelling in German or English.)

Twirling right towards my partner's sector, I was immediately aware of a man in a full green uniform with scrim on his combat helmet moving left - what would be backwards, towards West Berlin. Thankful for all the time I'd spent snap shooting my G&G M14, I heaved the RPK around and let off a sustained burst while shouting some unprepared insult about dirty Canucks. There was a low wall between myself and target, so I crouched behind this and diverted my attention to getting the rest of the section into action. I had barely turned my head when a BB struck me in the neck, and down I went in the middle of the road, with Ohio cowering behind the same half-wall barely a meter away.

From other storytellers, I learned that one of the Canadians charged forward and threw a cluster of four TLSFx Pea Grenades into our scattered line. There was only one section of the Canadians this far forward, and they had decimated our advance guard with one wounded. Further back, the Grenzer pair joined up with the rest of the section as they counterattacked. A Soviet section (roughly five men) also joined the action, but were beaten back by withering fire as the Canadians patched up the wounded, hauled myself and the other three East Germans to their feet, and made tracks back into West Berlin, where we were adorned with prisoner tags and spent some time in front of a camera being pressured to tell the secrets of communism's greatness.



All in all, the Canadian unit fought off roughly 15 PACT troops and inflicted severe casualties. The loss of four Mot-Shutzen as POWs effectively removed the entire section from play until we were returned to our own camp and waited out our respawn timers. An effective play - but it also burdened down NATO transport assets moving us all the way back to their camp, and tied up their operations officer with playing Human Intelligence Collector against conscripts who had no critical intelligence to collect.

While I was initially frustrated that our advance guard was so far removed and committed to checking dangerous territory without close support, it was made clear by the amount of firepower and explosives the NATO troops fired that a full-section line attack would have resulted in equally catastrophic damage to us, likely with no survivors and a destroyed truck as well, with the probable benefit of a few more enemy wounded. Overall though, it's airsoft; we were back ingame within a few hours, and spent some time later that day working on battle drills with renewed vigor. After all, we had no intent of ever being whipped so hard again.

More to come.

[Impulse]

After considerable delay, I'm back in the writing process. (Been spending a lot of time lately reading MOUT manuals for this blacksheep thing.)

Story 2: Death Valley

In nearly every way, terrain is the dominant influence over success in battle. You can look back through centuries for circumstances where a numerically weaker force was able to turn the tide against a stronger opponent through skillful use of terrain (and other skills). Although many factors of modern war have reduced the powerful effects of terrain (mechanization, airmobility, airpower, etc), small unit action is still hugely dependant on the surfaces it takes place on. This is especially true of D-Day Adventure Park, which is located right at the downwind end of the Great Plains and situated around two valleys that are at least a match for anything at Bangor. Combine the sheer size of the park with its significant verticality, and a foot march anywhere is a rough proposition.

Which in no way means we don't do it. Vehicles, after all, are much easier to hear and to kill than foot infantry.



Anyway, the point here is that to do missions, you need to put your people in a place where they can do damage, and ideally put them there without being detected and reacted against. The valleys are good for that, and get a lot of traffic some days as teams shuffle up and down the field trying to get that big kill. NATO had been pestering us significantly near the major junction at 50906935, and it was suspected that they were using the SME valley in the east to enter the area, so we chose to deploy and block that route.

Our units were shuffled up a bit for this mission, as it required a bit more precision than our largely-inexperienced Mot. Shutz were ready to demonstrate. The seven operational riflemen were broken up into two teams and attached to Soviet sections to glean experience from the senior Razvedkii. Hunter, Shadi, and myself were paired with MacClane's 'Dirty Third' section and moved up across the western side of the field, crossing to the north of Cottbus before taking positions in the northern section of SME Valley.



3rd Section deployed on the eastern side of the valley, and our NVA team set up on the west, along a fairly nondescript section of river valley, ready to enact the controversial PACT 'Parallel Ambush'. We located a conveniently dug out bunker structure and . A few paintball structures lined the bottom (four wall, no roof, double-digit square footage.) As I was still working the squad RPK at this point, I set up covering the northern axis, with Shadi watching the right side and Hunter centered, his back against our barricade, watching the rear. After setting camouflage for the protruding muzzle of the RPK and putting an eye on our Razvedka comrades across the way, we settled in to await contact.

I didn't record how long it was before we heard weapons popping off. Didn't seem long, but we did rotate positions twice within the ambush site and I believe we were on a 20 minute rotation. We had eyes out over the valley in both directions, but no sight of dark-uniformed NATO running for cover or pushing in an assault. In fact - they were about 200 feet east of our location, and further uphill, taking potshots at the Soviets' rear. There only appeared to be one or two NATO soldiers, and they seemed to be having trouble with their hop-ups sending rounds too far over the bunkered-down Soviets. Fire was traded, but no one was hit by the time the NATO pair had broken contact. After a brief pause, we regrouped both squads in the middle of the valley. The enemy knew we were here - it was time to not be here anymore.



We withdrew back towards camp, listening intently for the howl of Mutt and CUCV engines that would signal the imminent arrival of NATO's reaction force. We got lucky - maybe they didn't have a radio, or maybe the QRF just wasn't available for deployment. Either way, no one arrived to bring an end to our relatively successful mission.

Roughly 300 meters along the way, Mac (Soviet section leader, twice the EW vet that I am, and a great guy besides) decided that it was too early to go back to camp unsuccessful. A multitude of defensive positions were available on this stretch (a fortified area built for the annual D-Day paintball event), and even though it was a bit obvious, it would at least be hard for a reaction for to knock out. This was no longer a valley, as a small pond occupied the eastern edge (complete with replica landing craft). Soviets took up the central part of the defensive line, while the NVA were deployed off on the left flank against an incidental attack coming through Cottbuss.

The first exciting part of this location was when I spotted two unidentified soldiers pass within about 50m of us, along a ridge to the north. They had a minimum of identifiable gear, were holding their weapons oblique to us, and only appeared for a few seconds before crossing the crest of a hill and going on their way. Only saw two... well, we weren't going to chase them down, and they clearly hadn't seen us, so it was fairly irrelevant who they actually were.

They didn't see us, and they apparently did not see the US squad which came strolling down the valley a few minutes later, fully loaded for a long mission with weary eyes out.



There were five or six in all, who crossed effortlessly to the open area in front of Mac's section and out of our line sight. AEG fire opened up from the ambush team. There were some hits, but the Americans were still in good shape and returned fire effectively while searching for a way back. Unfortunately that way back brought them back around the bend where I could hit them. Weapon shouldered. Sights aligned. Trigger pull... magazine not feeding.

This had been a developing problem, and unfortunately I failed to mention it earlier in the narrative. Hop up issue I'm guessing, none of the 8 magazines or the drum were reliable. Anyway, we needed to push in and lock down the kill zone. I heard Mac calling 'hit' from over the hillside - not close to his own guys at all, as he had charged forward in the ambush for whatever maniac reason to do with crushing the enemy's fighting spirit. Being unarmed, I nominated myself to run over and patch him up. However, Hunter pulled rank on me and swapped weapons - my (actually his) nonfunctional RPK for his working AK. Then he and Shadi stepped off to the left to cut off the escape route while I moved right to the boundaries of the kill zone.

East Wind uses a pretty standard 'medic rope' system, where each player carries a strip of engineer tape, paracord, or whatever tied into three knots- these knots must be undone by any other player to heal the wounded. Pretty straightforward - when you have your medic rope with you, anyway. When I arrived at the end of my rush behind a sheet of plywood where the wounded MacClane lay dying, I found that he did not have a medic rope - left in his winter uniform, I think. Great - I'd thrown myself into a horrible position for nothing. Return fire was coming in, but fortunately the outgunned Americans were not able to concentrate on one target at a time, and only a few scattered shots came my way. Time to look for my next move...

Which turned out to be healing Mac, who had actually chosen to rip the collar liner out of his Afghanka jacket and tied knots into it. Easily untied, I stuffed the liner into his chest pocket and announced that I was moving left to meet with the rest of my section - who had apparently wrapped up shooting the bad guys. Now was time to collect some intel from the squad we'd just knocked out.



Intel collection was a goldmine. We considered taking a few prisoners, but sadly most of them had already passed their bleed out time. Good work, then, for the survivors who kept us from taking their buddies along with us. However, these guys had notepads. Oh man did they have notepads. I don't have any pictures of them - but we pulled about 10-15 pages of solid, unencrypted (except poor handwriting) notes that when combined, gave us names and coordinates for a number of key points in the NATO battle plan, as well as a look into the state of morale in the NATO camp (because who writes diary entries on the back of their mission notes?).

We packed up and returned home in high spirits. Three contacts (including the mystery pair which turned out to be a Grenzer patrol), two minor wounds, and one NATO overnight mission spoiled. Meanwhile the other Soviet section and NVA team were collecting all sorts of wonderful intel on the West side of the field. All in all, things were definitely looking up that Wednesday night.

[Impulse]

Story 3: My Day With Ready

I've been lucky. Each of the three East Winds I have attended have had about the same weather, with a bit of variation in temperature the only way to tell the years apart. Each time I arrived
in clear, cool weather, unpacked, and then it rained off and on for a few days. And each time, by the end of the week, spring has definitely broken out, with temperatures between 60-80, bright sun, and humidity. And then, usually, it rains again while camp is being taken down.



So generally speaking, Friday has been a very pleasant day to be at East Wind. We have gathered enough intelligence throughout the week to get a solid grasp of enemy OPs and routes and have either shut them down or have plans to use them as targets. With the transition to the Saturday endgame phase beginning, we generally have some specific objectives to undertake which allows us to trace out a battle plan for the entire company at once. And, with the sunny and clear weather... it's, for lack of a better phrase, a perfect storm.

We reshuffled our forces again. The lightly equipped Grenzers had been supreme in their reconnaissance role, but with the need for aggressive action we didn't need a third of our manpower diverted to scouting and withering in the face of a determined enemy. Instead, they were mixed in with our Motor Rifle squads, in a roughly 1:1 ratio. My section, lead by the senior Grenzer 'Mr. Ready', consisted of Mot. Shutz 'Shortround' and myself with Grenzers Vrakos, Francis, and... I beleive Master Chef was with us, as he spent a lot of time patrolling with Ready. Anyway, we were tasked to clear the main road up to the center of the field and secure Cottbus - the prime jewel of the terrain, and a place that had been mostly avoided all week - and occupy until further notice.

I had been on this mission almost word for word before, and it came with a horrifying conclusion and a serious addicition to everything that is East Wind. It's a crappy place to sit, surrounded by thick cover, easily observed from afar in many directions, and too big to actually secure with anything short of an overstrength platoon. Its lack of tree cover permits a steady breeze to flow through, and a variety of concrete pipes and Conex boxes set up as paintball obstacles provide an plenty eerie soundscape. On the plus side, it is very much in the way of anyone wanting to take the easy way across the field...



Friendly forces were in strength. Another mixed East German squad was responsible for patrolling the area near us, extending about 500m north of the border. Soviet sections continued to ambush and harass NATO movements to their strongpoint at the other major border junction about 400m to the west of us (which certainly was uncomfortably close). A specially recruited 'Gimp Squad' of our various minorly injured players were set up in the defensive positions blocking the eastern slope away from town, and Stagg chose to set up a forward command post to our rear, concealed within a pile of styrofoam blocks. All in all, WARPAC was representing in force that day, and planned to stay out long enough that NATO would HAVE to run into us, for better or worse.

With such short numbers on defense, Ready decided that our defensive strategy would be to post everyone out in observation posts, using TLSFX grenades as an alarm system. A grenade burst would be interpreted as a call for help, and the other lookouts would all have to collapse back to fight off the enemy and protect the CP. Meanwhile, Ready and Chef would stay mobile, communicate with the various posts, keep in the loop with Stagg and Coop, and generally do leader stuff.



My post was in the middle, with a primary axis of observation due north across the airfield and a secondary axis along a cliff-climbing road that lead down into SME valley. A number of shrubs and concrete tubes provided barriers and shadows, and I had a few clear lines of sight straight to the other end of the airstrip. I settled down behind a piece of concrete, added some scrim to my helmet net and the foliage loops on my uniform, streaked a little black camo facepaint in the manner of the Fallschrimjager to break up the shape of my goggles, and settled down for the long haul, glad that I was rested enough to not doze off.

As the sun was still rising, the patterns of shadows were shifting, and on a few occasions I had to move myself to a new spot to maintain my location in the shadows. This had the humorus result of Ready coming by to give me an update and glance around uncertainly before I whistled him over. The updates came in steady and indicated no real change - the biggest story was when he took over my spot while I went back to fetch an MRE for lunch, and shortly after, when he told us that he and Chef were taking a box of MRE's over to Gimp Squad.

Shortly after that came a grenade blast.

It was far enough away that it probably wasn't from one of the alarm posts. It was off on the right side of my position, seemingly down the road that Chef and Ready had started down a few minutes prior. If anything - it seemed that they had been ambushed on their way to the ambush sight. And we had no prescribed plan for reacting down that road.

Time was critical, less we wouldn't even know what had happened. I looked around for any other point guards moving to react - nothing. Time was important. I checked the current time and scanned over the airfield one more time, knowing how long it would take to cross that span on foot. I had to have eyes on the airfield before that time ran out. And with that - I set off over the hills and the road to see what could be seen.

Fast forward through a few minutes of alternating short jogs and stops as I crossed through loose forest and slowly caught the tone of AEGs alternating fire. Eventually, I crossed a crest which gave view of the battle - although I still had no idea at first of who was winning. Movement to my far right, in the fixed defenses, indicated that the ambush team was still functional. Chef, Ready, and Rebel (an injured Grenzer) were behind low cover directly to my front, alternating fire into the kill zone. Further to the left were people in dark green - could be Brits, Americans, or even West Germans. Scanning over, it appeared most were already hit. I saw one run back, the other firing to cover. A retreat!

I was still closing with Ready, as my default course of action was to report to him for direction. However, being safely uphill and almost out of range of the enemy - and unengaged - gave me the opportunity to move freely, and squandering that by following the chain of command wouldn't have been a clever thing to do. I shouted out my presence to Ready - who may or may not have heard, probably not - and took off to my left. Firing long-distance bursts down at the NATO troops (who I had by now identified as Americans, including my EW5 squadmate Tilt), I slipped back across the climbing road and up to the eastern borders of the airstrip. This position was incredibly exposed, of course, as the most likely routes for an enemy reaction force would be either through the valley in front of me, or accross the airfield behind me, and neither one afforded me a good way out. So, to make this quick...

By this point only Tilt was the only target remaining. He had retreated out of the kill zone, and the assault force from our ambush had not caught up with the change in terrain. Perhaps they didn't know that I had gotten involved, and given up on the pursuit. Well - I didn't want anyone getting away, so quickly weighed the odds before popping back up and laying an entire magazine into the styrofoam that my foe was hidden behind. This was about when I heard Ready and Rebel coming up the valley, locking Tilt into place with a crossfire that lasted another twenty seconds or so.

I checked the surroundings one more time before collapsing down into the valley to meet up with the others. Unfortunately I couldn't stick around to gloat, or even to swap stories, as my timer had run down and my lookout post was getting lonely. Besides, this was Gimp Squad's area of responsibility. It was time to go.

Fast forwarding, Vrakos hurt his ankle because he was wearing jackboots and slipped on a branch or something. I spotted people moving toward us in olive uniforms with scrim in their helmets way on the other side of the airfield, could be Canadians; ran back to Ready, who pulled out binoculars and confirmed after a minute that they were the other East German composite squad, who moved into town with us and turned our tiny garrison into a capable blocking force. Oh, and we blew up the enemy CO in his Mutt as he gunned it across the airstrip, only to find a few minutes later that we had been ordered to stand down and move back from the border as the political situation de-escalated. Ooops...

[Impulse]

With recent news that EW8 will be the last EW event, it's time for another story, this one a throwback to my younger days as a rookie GI at East Wind 5.



Details of the story are probably a bit confused by the passing of time, but here goes.

The first time for anything is always a bit unreal. I had no idea what I was really getting myself into, despite dozens to hundreds of hour of study and preparation. Living in NY at the time, I had a 24 hour drive to DDAP, accompanied by my roommate at the time (Catch22) and two older players I picked up along the way. This, in itself, was an insane task, and was followed by a sudden complete immersion into the American Army of 1991.

Pacing was nothing like I'd experienced in an airsoft game before. At that time I wouldn't call myself a 'serious airsofter' as I'd only been able to attend a couple of major events here in MI, and NY was entirely a rec game scene. I'm pretty sure my last game prior to EW was this one:



Whereas at East Wind, we didn't even acknowledge that there was an enemy on the field until 48 hours after I'd arrived. My squad was building forward defensive positions at the critical crossroads at 50906935, and surged forward into Coleville (later Cottbus) to chase off an apparent Soviet scout patrol. Except I didn't, because I was the new guy and got tasked to sitting in a hole in the ground guarding the squad truck.

So Tuesday was the first chance I had to observe the enemy. Coleville, the miserable centerfield town of the prior story, needed defending, and our heavy 1st Squad was tapped to sit there and look menacing. We had six shooters at the time, from a starting strength of eight. (Down two members without even sighting an enemy! East Wind!) We set up defensive positions in the center of town, three men in each tower of the primary "apartments" building.



We'd stationed people in town before so logistically it seemed reasonable. I figured we'd be out for a few hours, but we were not geared for anything beyond sitting still and maybe fighting off a 10-12 man attack. We sat still and covered our zones for some time; we didn't truly have the strength to do anything more. And inexperience lead to mistakes - like our two fireteams being almost completely isolated only a few meters from each other, no one being on rest rotation, and no one patrolling out, not even to the town borders. Not even when, hours into our defense, some bad guys showed up and started shouting at us, as shown here:



Speech delivered by a true RusFed serviceman. Because it's East Wind.

We didn't get relief when expected. We hadn't asked how long we'd be there, and thus were surprised when the dinner truck showed up with a UK section to pull security and a crate of night vision headsets. Night vision?! We were tasked to hold position overnight in windowless unheated concrete structures. Blacksheepers, I bet you know where this is going...

We kept our eyes out and as the sun set, started practice with the NODs. We were given an AN/PVS-5 set, one of these vintage pieces:



They were really not that bad! Well, they were useless when worn over the airsoft-required goggles, but the seal on the PVS was considered good enough to take care of any errant BBs, so removing my goggles and glasses made them work. And seriously - night to day, even if it was a disorienting, star-filled, green-hued day. Combine a pair of these with the motion detectors (Platoon Early Warning System) that the Canadians had deployed earlier in the day, being dutifully observed by the ratelo in the other building, and we felt reasonably sure that even with the darkness, we would be aware of an enemy attack before it happened.

Still couldn't see anyone, though. The Sovs were certainly aware that we were in place, and without a doubt had surveillance on our position. And it was getting cold, colder than we had anticipated; for the first time I was happy to be wearing a stupid 9 pound Kevlar vest - my arms were chilled behind only a BDU shirt, but the torso was reasonably comfortable.

We started rest rotations of about 20 minutes, which made all the difference. As a note, our squad distibution was less than ideal; I had fireteam leaders from both A and B in my structure, with the SL and one shooter from each FT in the other building. But I was the youngest, and didn't have grounds to complain; I hadn't even known how to properly tie my boots until a few days prior.

Night crept by uneventfully. I began to think that we might make it through the mission without dying terribly. We pulled bunker foam from outside to make an insulated sleeping pad, to keep the concrete from sapping our body heat. I settled down for sleep rotation number... don't remember what number. It was somewhere around 0100, I think, and there I was passed out hard with my M16 and the squad M60 settled against a nearby wall on the second floor.

Tilt shook me awake with urgent whispers that we were under attack. Nothing really registered at first, but the first streak of a flare arcing across the sky kicked me into action. No orders - my first action was to grab the M60 and deploy prone at the top of the ramp to block entry to the building.

The two fireteam leaders looked at each other, but we didn't take action. I heard pops (pea grenades) and unintelligible shouting, which turned out to be, of course, Russian. Not a lot of AEG fire. We didn't move, specifically avoided looking out the windows to avoid getting popped by the enemy. I knew inaction would mean the other building was on their own, exactly the enemy plan... but I was the junior.

The Soviets did their business and ran off into the dark. After a few minutes, we formed up our trio to cross over to the other building and pick up the pieces. We mediced in the frustrated squad leader and the last rifleman. Our ratelo was gone, with his equipment. Our PEWS monitor showed a warning tone... he'd been asleep, and missed the alert, and now was certainly on the way to some distant interrogation post.



We sat tight for a minute before redistributing our defense to one position. It turned out that we had called back for supply of snivel gear to help with the even colder parts of the night approaching. That would be expected to be a CUCV blasting along, headlights on, maybe with some forward security, if it could be found. Instead...

Purple eyes stared out of the night at us from the south. Very intense, muted, nearly invisible purple eyes like nothing I'd ever seen. Whaaat? We turned to face it, expecting some soviet effort to clean up the leftovers. But nope! Turned out it was the infared searchlight of the Ferret scout car, which you're not supposed to be able to see with normal vision...

They had arrived loaded with sleeping bags and ponchos to help us survive the night. Instead, they ended up hauling 5 cold tired Americans back into camp.

To those who don't know, this thing is pretty small:



We debriefed and conked out. The mission was relatively a success, I think. I have no idea what the commander's intent was anymore. It could have gone a lot better, and we could have avoided compromising our radio frequencies, force makeup, and SOI. The following notes were collected from interrogation with the RTO:

Unit Radio Callsign George 2-3
HQ Radio Callsign John 8-9
Night Vision Equipment PVS 14, PVS 003
Prisoner Henry Curfman
Affiliation - US Army
Rank - Private
From Kansas
Unit CO Warnick
Unit XO Alan Swayze
- Notes: Vietnam Vet
615th Canadian Paratroopers
5-6 Canadian Personnel
8-10 British Mechanized Infantry

There are two 9 Man squads of US Army Infantry

Story may be a little underdramatic... but these events are what hooked me on EW. For all the mistakes and confusion; it was simply an unbelievable epic situation. But at the story goes, you had to be there.

And you have your chance! This happens once a year. But next year appears to be the last one. Don't miss it!

[Gimpalong]

Really sad to hear that 2015 will be the last run for this event.

It's disheartening to hear the organizers lament the changing state of the sport as (one of) their reasons for ending the event.