Sumpin not considered

As most of y’all know, I am a perpetual student.  Doesn’t matter what I am learning, I will find a way of incorporating it into the database that clutters my grey matter.

Writing is and has become an extension of that.  If I don’t know something, I can’t write about.  So research will be involved.    Yup, pretty obvious to the blind duck, ya say.

Yeah, I tend to be obtuse when the obvious is sitting in my face.

The book is progressing well; recently sent out a copy of what is done (first draft, not complete) to be sampled and critiqued by the recipient, and got back some seriously good news and advice.   I was at the hump point, where many a story die untimely deaths, and needed either encouragement, or, well, mostly encouragement.   Of course, the advice part was heeded, and there are some minor revisions being made to a chapter or two.   Clarity issues or just removing dead weight that dragged the story down.

Now the encouragement side of it came not just in the words of the reader, but in the time aspect.   I had word back in less than 2 days!   That showed me that others found what I was writing was worth reading, engaging enough to wade through the dead weight, and entertaining to some extent.   I have to guess about the entertaining, but the speed at which they read the book was far better than I expected.   That, and that alone gave me a huge boost of ego to get going again on the writing.  (not like I had stopped or anything, but I was starting to get bogged down in details that would kill the whole thing.)

So, I am back at it, with more vigor than I had a week ago, and I am shooting for a July release date.

I’ll even give a little excerpt of it for you here.   Enjoy.

“Get out of there G! That technical is gonna cut you out of the sky if you don’t!” barks Tick-tock.
I have the bird circling the battlefield trying to find a good spot to dive in and take that heavy gun out. Its been chewing our boys up for the last 2 minutes: 2 minutes is a VERY long time when lead is flying within a two-way shooting gallery. The boys did good with a 40mm grenade to the block of its transport and made it so it’s a sitting duck now, but they are having a hell of a time trying to take the beast out completely. That’s my job now.

Only, I’m down to a couple hundred rounds on the auto-cannon, and not one roman candle left. Turn around to reload is 45 minutes and that’s 45 minutes those boys don’t have. “T, I gotta do something, or that thing is gonna take out the rest of the platoon. Let me have one more strafe and see if I can’t at least disable that thing. It can’t move now, but its too heavily armored for the boys to get at the gunner.”
“If they can’t get at it, what makes you think your cannon will. We have armor busters on the rack, get the bird back here and we can reload.”
“Not gonna happen! If I do that, there won’t be anything to go back there for except cleanup of bodies, and we don’t do that from the air.” I respond. I think I have the lineup here. Won’t be able to do much with what rounds I have, but if I can get that ring locked up so the gun can’t traverse, the boys have a chance. “I’m going in!”
“Don’t do it G! “barks Tick-tock, but I ignore him. I bump the throttle to 90% and line up on that ring. Small burst to make sure I have what I want, and then full burst to give ‘em something to think about. Crap, lots of sparks but that gun is turning my way. Another burst, more sparks, but no change. Coming in fast and I can see right down the barrel of that 12.5mm heavy. Bump that throttle to 110% and lay on the trigger, this is gonna be painful.
“Dammit G, pull out, pull out, get outta there! He’s gonna rip you in two in a second.” Yells T. I can see the flare of the rounds bursting out the barrel of his gun, as I hear the clacking of my auto-cannon as it runs dry.
I have one weapon left, hot engines, 10 gallons of JP-5 and one 300-pound plane moving at 120 mph of momentum. That gun is getting real big on my screen and I can hear the rounds impacting Damocles airframe and then nothing but static on both headphones and screen. Game over. At least for me today.
Only its not a game. There are really friends of mine out there dying today, and I just wasted a $45000.00 model airplane that was loaded with real missiles and a .308 auto-cannon in its nose when I ‘took off’ this morning. They are out there getting chewed up, while I sit in this rig in air-conditioned comfort playing Combat pilot via radio control and an FPV setup. I can hear T sobbing at his station from where I sit. I pull off my helmet/Virtual reality rig and look over at him. Those tears are real.
“I’m sorry T, I had to do it and now those boys have a chance to make it back here tonight.”
“I know, but its gonna be damned hard to replace Damocles now. We just don’t have access to the parts like we did 3 years ago.” T says, and pauses. “I’ll send word to Gunny that we need a new auto-cannon, but we are going to have to use the last of the spare engines to rebuild. And we have to rebuild, this mess didn’t wrap up just because we used up our gear.” He gets up and heads over to my rig, grabbing my wheelchair on the way. I get out of the rig no problem, but need him to hold the chair while I get in. Not having legs is a pain, in more ways than one.
“The Eagle doesn’t carry as many missiles, but it has better range. We can use it for the time being. It won’t work as well as the Warthog frame for close support, but it has the advantage of being much harder to hit. I’m going to go talk to the captain and try and stay in the loop for what’s going on out there. We may have to get our butts in gear and advance backwards tonight.” I say, with a bit of dread carried in my voice. I always hate having to deal with command, even though I am technically the same rank as the Captain.
“Agreed. I’ll get the rig road ready, just in case. Be cool with the Captain, hot head. He may ream you for pulling that kamikaze move there.”
” My plane, my rules. And it sucked enough knowing that I really hadn’t a choice, and I will bet he says nothing at all about it.” I reply, but I am thinking that I need to keep my tongue locked between my molars for the next 20 minutes or so. I do have a tendency to shoot from the hip when Higher-ups rip my ass. I have never been known for my stellar diplomacy. Quite the opposite seeing how, even now, T called me ‘hothead’.
Well, since I did the deed, lets see if the price I paid was enough. I’m hoping that I wiped that heavy gun across the plains out there, and our boys are able to advance to where they were planning. If not, we are going to have to pull up stakes and advance backwards: retreat is the proper term, but I’ll be damned if I have to like that term.
Rolling my chair across to the tent where the Captain is commanding things, I can hear that the battle is still quite hot. Gunfire and yelling are coming across the speakers as information is flowing in, while orders are flowing out. I have never like the way modern combat is so sanitized and micro-managed, but it does work, and the casualty rate is much lower, but it seems like there should be some lag in the decision making that would get more people killed. I stop at the edge of the tent as there is just not that much room in there with all the people milling around. I can see the Captain in the center of it all grabbing information where its coming, making decisions and barking commands out to the radio operators. It certainly takes a certain amount of trust on the receiving end of that radio to know that whatever you are being told to do has a bigger purpose no matter how suicidal it may seem. Luckily, being a separate entity, I was given autonomy on the field, with my soul mission being to support the ground troops to the best of my and my planes ability. I made the ‘command decision’ to end that planes existence out there today: I can only hope that the Captain concurs.
Listening in to the traffic in that tent, it sounds like the boys are on the move. I can tell that they are in pursuit by the tone of the gunfire; it sounds distant for the most part, and when it doesn’t, its in short bursts. I catch the eye of the Captain and he gives me an abbreviated salute: I guess I did alright in his book. It helps, but the fact that my bird is now splattered all over Four Corners, New Mexico doesn’t feel good no matter if the cause was just.
A younger man, corporal by his stripes comes up to me, “Sir, the Captain asked if he could meet up with you and T later this evening? He is quite busy and would rather talk when he’s a little less occupied.” He looks like the typical Gopher that every unit has: Go-fer coffee, Go-fer the Chaplain, etc. He’s young, looks peaked as if the sounds coming out of those speakers is giving him the willies. Its one thing to run a first-person shooter game and quite another when the sounds are known to be happening in real life. I know I have a serious disconnect when running in my VR rig. Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, while my eyes and head are shooting across the landscape several miles away. It can get a little disorienting.
“Gotcha. T and I will be in our rig when he’s available, Corporal.” I reply. “How are things going out there now?” I ask.
“Moving now. What you did made the difference. We lost one guy in the blast, he was trying to get in close to get a grenade in over the shields. Don’t know who though.” He lies. I can see it in his eyes, and I have a feeling I know the person too. Damn! I hate blue on blue accidents, especially when I am one side of that blue. No way I could have known he was there, and there was no way he could have known what I was going to do: I didn’t even know until I was hammered down and going in.

“I am sure the Captain will inform me when he gets time. Thank you, Corporal. Out here, shit happens, no one has to like it.”        I return his salute and turn my wheels around back towards the RV where the rest of my “command” is.   Four spare engines. Two for the Eagle, and two left from Damocles. We aren’t going to be building another Damocles any time soon, not out here. I am going to have to get used to running at twice the speed of the old warthog. I pause for a minute thinking ‘I just wiped out the only thing that gave me purpose, possibly killed a friend in the process, and here I am doing mental logistics and training for the next mission. Am I fucking insane?” Shaking my head, I get moving again.
Back in the trailer, “Did you know that I killed one of our guys in that fireball, T?”
“I wasn’t for sure, but now I am. I thought I saw Paul near the back of that truck when you were going in, but things happened too fast. I wasn’t recording it either, so I had no way of going back to see. I’m glad I didn’t record it now.”
Damn! I feel even more like shit now. Paul was one of the good ones; had incentive so to speak. His ranch was 5 miles off the border 2 years ago. Now its 100 miles behind enemy lines. And so is his family, he hopes. Times like this that I want to backhand slap that asshole that said, “All’s fair in love and war.” I know “fair” is a highly misused word, but the jerk that wrote that,,,,