Post by Insano-Man on Sept 24, 2018 9:35:52 GMT -5
Trial by Fire
On the morning of March 22nd, 2201 A.F., the 3rd battalion of the 104th Verrincross Rangers of the Garrant Commonwealth Armed Forces were conducting field exercises on the outlying shores of Svobodanholdt on their native homeworld of Verrincross. It was also on that morning that their training would be put to the test, as recruits undergoing their graduation trials were pitted against veteran raiders of the Skuunas splinter group of the Skuuvan pirates. Isolated from their supply lines as part of the training exercise, the rangers would be forced to fight for survival in a conflict they were sorrowfully unprepared for.
On the 20th of March, two days prior to the battle, the rangers - a mix of recruits preparing for graduation and regulars being put through a refresher course - packed their equipment, loaded their weapons, and were dropped along with a detachment from the 3rd Armored of the 18th Verrincross Mechanized Infantry & Armored Vehicles division. As part of the exercise, they were required to navigate the jungles and coastlines of the region in order to find the location in which their graduation ceremony was to be held, all without any hints or clues as to where it might be other than a single image of the military installation it was to take place in. Without the aid of orbital imagery or other advanced technological assistance commonplace in the Garran Armed Forces, the task was certain to be daunting for the rangers who were selected on the basis of their unfamiliarity with the terrain. The personnel of the 3rd Armored were also still under training, having been chosen to accompany the rangers in order to give them a real taste of what maneuvers with a small combined arms force would be like. With limited fuel for their vehicles, fast and effective forward reconnaissance would be necessary to fully accomplish the test. Any tank or transport that had to be left behind would seal the fate of its crew and stamp failing grades on their test results.
A day would pass without any success in finding the installation the rangers were tasked with reaching. Supplies had begun to fall and every man knew of it, driving the men who had volunteered to scout potential leads faster and harder. Every time one of these recon teams had failed to find anything, the blow was felt across the entire detachment. Every hour counted and every hour wasted would mean less supplies and an exponentially higher chance that the MIAV crewmen would be forced to ditch a vehicle and forfeit a crew's hope of passing the test. As the second night of empty-handed reconnaissance reports loomed on the trainees, the rangers and vehicle crews resigned themselves to wait for dawn in order to conserve fuel.
The second day of the exercise began quietly. As the majority of the detachment began to awake, the sounds of music and idle chat spilled out from the interiors of the MIAV vehicles, creating a deceptively casual atmosphere for the desperate situation. Many of the rangers and crewmen were still eating their breakfast rations, congregating around the tanks and armored personnel carriers that had served as their impromptu field barracks. Many had done away with their ordinary combat uniforms to help them cope with the hot and humid weather of the daytime. The appearance of the detachment in its waking hours was almost unthinkable for the attitude among the troops.
However, this casual atmosphere would soon be broken as gunshots began to ring out from among the tall, grass-like plants of the jungle and an inhuman chorus of battle cries began to drown out the music. Skuuvan pirates, believing they had found a civilian trade convoy, struck the unprepared rangers and crewmen with a small raiding party. The pirates, however, were just as unprepared as the soldiers they would find themselves fighting against, as the raiders were unready, unwilling, and not equipped properly to fight off the small army the detachment represented. As soon as they caught sight of the gathering of men and vehicles, scrambling to ready and load their weapons, the pirates broke and fled, their howling battle cries soon changing to a fearful whistle, their alien language's call to flee. The few shots that were fired were those of the Skuuvan on their approach, in an attempt to scare off what they had thought were civilians. The Garran troops, staring down the sights of their weapons, found themselves almost ready to burst into laughter at the sight of the rapid turnabout of twenty armed Gallin raiders.
However, the amusement of the rangers and crewmen would be short-lived, as the panicked raiders would soon come to realize that the unit they had encountered was likely small enough for their splinter group's full force to kill and loot. While human equipment was difficult, if not impossible, for the Gallin pirates to utilize, its sale value to other pirates or on the black market easily made up for the task of stealing it.
As the now-emboldened raiders returned to their temporary headquarters around the spacecraft they had arrived on, the rangers sobered themselves as many remembered their training on Gallin strategy; pirates or militia, the Gallin always brought numbers and always in mass. The raiders would undoubtedly be back and with the numbers to overrun the detachment.
Faced with a situation growing ever more desperate, the personnel of the self-named Fahvin Bravo-Deuce detachment - Garran phonetic code for "Fucked Beyond Belief" - set the distress signals on all of their equipment to broadcast. The tactical command assigned to the area, believing the troops to be opting to end the exercise before they could complete it, sent a low-priority request for several dropships to airlift them and their vehicles from the area. This request would be answered eight hours later - far too late to provide any real assistance to the then-embattled rangers and crewmen.
Still keenly aware of their inability to properly fight off potentially thousands of Skuuvan pirates, the Garran trainees quickly sought higher ground in order to press their defensive advantage; while a tank unit, the 3rd Armored had been assigned two mobile artillery vehicles as part of the gunnery crews' training. These cannons, while manned by inexperienced staff, would prove vital to Fahvin Bravo-Deuce's ability to hold back the pirates.
Soon enough, the raiders returned, striking the convoy with two hundred infantry as they climbed a small hill they had picked as their defensive position. The pirate leaders, believing the force to be much smaller, had assigned two hundred raiders, each of roughly half the value of each Garran recruit in tactical thinking and combat skills, to fight the sixty-strong rangers and the six armored vehicles they escorted. Realizing quickly that they were outgunned yet again, the raiders leading the charge ordered their men to break and retreat, taking eight casualties in the process. As the pirates returned again an hour later to attack the convoy, this time with a force of seven hundred.
However, the second failed assault had given the rangers greater sense of urgency in creating a defensive position on the hill. Hasty foxholes and lines arranged against the assaulting pirates proved to be almost as valuable as the artillery shelling the oncoming infantry. The few shots that would take rangers out of the fight or damage the vehicles supporting them were mostly limited to potshots and inaccurate, lucky shots taken from long range.
The recruits, still inexperienced in fighting Gallin opponents, saw the lopsided engagement - an almost twenty-to-one kills-to-losses rate for the rangers - as indicative of their chances of success. Morale during the engagement was as high as it could have been for the brazen trainees. While veterans of conflicts with the Gallin would have despaired, knowing their doctrine of numerical superiority above all else, the recruits believed that the growing piles of dead and wounded pirates before their line proved that the enemy could not last against them. As the battle dragged on and this belief pervaded the Garran troops, cheers began to ring out amid the rattle of automatic weapons, thundering of cannons, and bangs of railgun fire.
The reality of the engagement, however, was that the defenders were steadily losing. Casualties mounted and small arms fire from the attackers took its toll on the armored vehicles atop the hill. One of the two Sportsman main battle tanks had its 36mm railgun disabled from a catastrophic ammunition misfire, likely the result of an enemy bullet disfiguring the rails guiding the projectile down its barrel. The gunner of one of the APCs supporting the rangers was killed when an anti-tank rifle found its mark on his turret. The rangers wounded by potshots soon grew to nearly half of the unit's strength. Raiders grew closer and closer to the top of the hill with each push, determined, either through vengeance or greed, to kill the Garrans holding their line.
But the fight would not end in victory for the pirates. At 1604 Earth standard, finally wise to what was really happening, Svobodanholdt Tactical Command dispatched four gunships and six dropships to cover and evacuate the trainees on the ground. An advance group of carrier-borne fighters was stationed in high orbit over the battle zone to intercept any attempt at a Skuuvan retreat, as well, locking the raiders' fate to be that of death or capture. As the gunships screamed overhead and broke their charge just behind the advancing Skuuvan forces, a cheer erupted in unison from the soldiers holding the hill. At the same time, a terrified call for a retreat broke out among most of the pirates still standing. The gunships of the Garran Airwatch gave no quarter when they arrived, decimating at least two thirds of the fleeing raiders before they could seek cover in the dense foliage of the jungle. And as the pirates attempted to flee into orbit, the Navy caught them with its fighter patrols, crippling their vessel as it attempted to jump from the system. The raiders were soon captured as the carrier Noventeir attached boarding and towing lines to their ship, dragging it back to port as rangers entered the battered ship and seized control of it from the few pirates who still retained the will to fight.
Of the eighty men who set out on the 20th, only fourteen would be killed on the hill the rangers had set themselves upon. Eighteen men would lie wounded and live to see their graduation ceremony with those who had survived uninjured. Among the pirates, at least five hundred and twenty were found to be killed at the hands of the rangers, with at least two hundred more dead from gunship strikes and the damage sustained by their stolen merchant vessel, rechristened as the Skuuvan Skuunas, or Dead Man's Plague in English. Forty-five more were captured with their ship and imprisoned for life on the planet they had attempted to make a hunting grounds of.
The rangers and crewmen of Fahvin Bravo-Deuce had technically failed their graduation exercise, but were all given passing grades for their bravery in fighting off the alien pirates. Additionally, the men who lost their lives in the engagement were posthumously awarded with the Bronze Fist medallion, an equivalent of the Woodsman's Star - the highest decoration in the Armed Forces - for courage and sacrifice in the face of both personal shortcomings, in their lack of training and supplies, and overwhelming odds. The battle would live on as the Battle of Fahvin Bravo-Deuce in honor of the trainees' nickname for their unit. The raiders killed in the conflict would be buried under the hill they had attempted to take from the Garran troops, marked only by a lone Commonwealth flag standing above their grave and a bronze plaque underneath, commemorating the trainees who gave their lives in defense of the hill.
On the morning of March 22nd, 2201 A.F., the 3rd battalion of the 104th Verrincross Rangers of the Garrant Commonwealth Armed Forces were conducting field exercises on the outlying shores of Svobodanholdt on their native homeworld of Verrincross. It was also on that morning that their training would be put to the test, as recruits undergoing their graduation trials were pitted against veteran raiders of the Skuunas splinter group of the Skuuvan pirates. Isolated from their supply lines as part of the training exercise, the rangers would be forced to fight for survival in a conflict they were sorrowfully unprepared for.
On the 20th of March, two days prior to the battle, the rangers - a mix of recruits preparing for graduation and regulars being put through a refresher course - packed their equipment, loaded their weapons, and were dropped along with a detachment from the 3rd Armored of the 18th Verrincross Mechanized Infantry & Armored Vehicles division. As part of the exercise, they were required to navigate the jungles and coastlines of the region in order to find the location in which their graduation ceremony was to be held, all without any hints or clues as to where it might be other than a single image of the military installation it was to take place in. Without the aid of orbital imagery or other advanced technological assistance commonplace in the Garran Armed Forces, the task was certain to be daunting for the rangers who were selected on the basis of their unfamiliarity with the terrain. The personnel of the 3rd Armored were also still under training, having been chosen to accompany the rangers in order to give them a real taste of what maneuvers with a small combined arms force would be like. With limited fuel for their vehicles, fast and effective forward reconnaissance would be necessary to fully accomplish the test. Any tank or transport that had to be left behind would seal the fate of its crew and stamp failing grades on their test results.
A day would pass without any success in finding the installation the rangers were tasked with reaching. Supplies had begun to fall and every man knew of it, driving the men who had volunteered to scout potential leads faster and harder. Every time one of these recon teams had failed to find anything, the blow was felt across the entire detachment. Every hour counted and every hour wasted would mean less supplies and an exponentially higher chance that the MIAV crewmen would be forced to ditch a vehicle and forfeit a crew's hope of passing the test. As the second night of empty-handed reconnaissance reports loomed on the trainees, the rangers and vehicle crews resigned themselves to wait for dawn in order to conserve fuel.
The second day of the exercise began quietly. As the majority of the detachment began to awake, the sounds of music and idle chat spilled out from the interiors of the MIAV vehicles, creating a deceptively casual atmosphere for the desperate situation. Many of the rangers and crewmen were still eating their breakfast rations, congregating around the tanks and armored personnel carriers that had served as their impromptu field barracks. Many had done away with their ordinary combat uniforms to help them cope with the hot and humid weather of the daytime. The appearance of the detachment in its waking hours was almost unthinkable for the attitude among the troops.
However, this casual atmosphere would soon be broken as gunshots began to ring out from among the tall, grass-like plants of the jungle and an inhuman chorus of battle cries began to drown out the music. Skuuvan pirates, believing they had found a civilian trade convoy, struck the unprepared rangers and crewmen with a small raiding party. The pirates, however, were just as unprepared as the soldiers they would find themselves fighting against, as the raiders were unready, unwilling, and not equipped properly to fight off the small army the detachment represented. As soon as they caught sight of the gathering of men and vehicles, scrambling to ready and load their weapons, the pirates broke and fled, their howling battle cries soon changing to a fearful whistle, their alien language's call to flee. The few shots that were fired were those of the Skuuvan on their approach, in an attempt to scare off what they had thought were civilians. The Garran troops, staring down the sights of their weapons, found themselves almost ready to burst into laughter at the sight of the rapid turnabout of twenty armed Gallin raiders.
However, the amusement of the rangers and crewmen would be short-lived, as the panicked raiders would soon come to realize that the unit they had encountered was likely small enough for their splinter group's full force to kill and loot. While human equipment was difficult, if not impossible, for the Gallin pirates to utilize, its sale value to other pirates or on the black market easily made up for the task of stealing it.
As the now-emboldened raiders returned to their temporary headquarters around the spacecraft they had arrived on, the rangers sobered themselves as many remembered their training on Gallin strategy; pirates or militia, the Gallin always brought numbers and always in mass. The raiders would undoubtedly be back and with the numbers to overrun the detachment.
Faced with a situation growing ever more desperate, the personnel of the self-named Fahvin Bravo-Deuce detachment - Garran phonetic code for "Fucked Beyond Belief" - set the distress signals on all of their equipment to broadcast. The tactical command assigned to the area, believing the troops to be opting to end the exercise before they could complete it, sent a low-priority request for several dropships to airlift them and their vehicles from the area. This request would be answered eight hours later - far too late to provide any real assistance to the then-embattled rangers and crewmen.
Still keenly aware of their inability to properly fight off potentially thousands of Skuuvan pirates, the Garran trainees quickly sought higher ground in order to press their defensive advantage; while a tank unit, the 3rd Armored had been assigned two mobile artillery vehicles as part of the gunnery crews' training. These cannons, while manned by inexperienced staff, would prove vital to Fahvin Bravo-Deuce's ability to hold back the pirates.
Soon enough, the raiders returned, striking the convoy with two hundred infantry as they climbed a small hill they had picked as their defensive position. The pirate leaders, believing the force to be much smaller, had assigned two hundred raiders, each of roughly half the value of each Garran recruit in tactical thinking and combat skills, to fight the sixty-strong rangers and the six armored vehicles they escorted. Realizing quickly that they were outgunned yet again, the raiders leading the charge ordered their men to break and retreat, taking eight casualties in the process. As the pirates returned again an hour later to attack the convoy, this time with a force of seven hundred.
However, the second failed assault had given the rangers greater sense of urgency in creating a defensive position on the hill. Hasty foxholes and lines arranged against the assaulting pirates proved to be almost as valuable as the artillery shelling the oncoming infantry. The few shots that would take rangers out of the fight or damage the vehicles supporting them were mostly limited to potshots and inaccurate, lucky shots taken from long range.
The recruits, still inexperienced in fighting Gallin opponents, saw the lopsided engagement - an almost twenty-to-one kills-to-losses rate for the rangers - as indicative of their chances of success. Morale during the engagement was as high as it could have been for the brazen trainees. While veterans of conflicts with the Gallin would have despaired, knowing their doctrine of numerical superiority above all else, the recruits believed that the growing piles of dead and wounded pirates before their line proved that the enemy could not last against them. As the battle dragged on and this belief pervaded the Garran troops, cheers began to ring out amid the rattle of automatic weapons, thundering of cannons, and bangs of railgun fire.
The reality of the engagement, however, was that the defenders were steadily losing. Casualties mounted and small arms fire from the attackers took its toll on the armored vehicles atop the hill. One of the two Sportsman main battle tanks had its 36mm railgun disabled from a catastrophic ammunition misfire, likely the result of an enemy bullet disfiguring the rails guiding the projectile down its barrel. The gunner of one of the APCs supporting the rangers was killed when an anti-tank rifle found its mark on his turret. The rangers wounded by potshots soon grew to nearly half of the unit's strength. Raiders grew closer and closer to the top of the hill with each push, determined, either through vengeance or greed, to kill the Garrans holding their line.
But the fight would not end in victory for the pirates. At 1604 Earth standard, finally wise to what was really happening, Svobodanholdt Tactical Command dispatched four gunships and six dropships to cover and evacuate the trainees on the ground. An advance group of carrier-borne fighters was stationed in high orbit over the battle zone to intercept any attempt at a Skuuvan retreat, as well, locking the raiders' fate to be that of death or capture. As the gunships screamed overhead and broke their charge just behind the advancing Skuuvan forces, a cheer erupted in unison from the soldiers holding the hill. At the same time, a terrified call for a retreat broke out among most of the pirates still standing. The gunships of the Garran Airwatch gave no quarter when they arrived, decimating at least two thirds of the fleeing raiders before they could seek cover in the dense foliage of the jungle. And as the pirates attempted to flee into orbit, the Navy caught them with its fighter patrols, crippling their vessel as it attempted to jump from the system. The raiders were soon captured as the carrier Noventeir attached boarding and towing lines to their ship, dragging it back to port as rangers entered the battered ship and seized control of it from the few pirates who still retained the will to fight.
Of the eighty men who set out on the 20th, only fourteen would be killed on the hill the rangers had set themselves upon. Eighteen men would lie wounded and live to see their graduation ceremony with those who had survived uninjured. Among the pirates, at least five hundred and twenty were found to be killed at the hands of the rangers, with at least two hundred more dead from gunship strikes and the damage sustained by their stolen merchant vessel, rechristened as the Skuuvan Skuunas, or Dead Man's Plague in English. Forty-five more were captured with their ship and imprisoned for life on the planet they had attempted to make a hunting grounds of.
The rangers and crewmen of Fahvin Bravo-Deuce had technically failed their graduation exercise, but were all given passing grades for their bravery in fighting off the alien pirates. Additionally, the men who lost their lives in the engagement were posthumously awarded with the Bronze Fist medallion, an equivalent of the Woodsman's Star - the highest decoration in the Armed Forces - for courage and sacrifice in the face of both personal shortcomings, in their lack of training and supplies, and overwhelming odds. The battle would live on as the Battle of Fahvin Bravo-Deuce in honor of the trainees' nickname for their unit. The raiders killed in the conflict would be buried under the hill they had attempted to take from the Garran troops, marked only by a lone Commonwealth flag standing above their grave and a bronze plaque underneath, commemorating the trainees who gave their lives in defense of the hill.
