Petrofied:
(Alternately titled: A series of bad decision that miraculously worked out for Noyava)
Ah, life as a member of a PMC - the guns, the gear, the fancy company issued watches! Hired to secure an insurgent cache we rolled in feeling very confident. Sure half our team was wearing high visibility yellow shirts, and we had a severely lack of head protection, but we were obviously going to win over some untrained insurgents. Should have been a walk in the park. Should have been...
We dismounted and Alpha 1 went out of a flank manuever, masked by a low hill. I was in Alpha 2, tasked as a base of fire element. We moved into our assigned position and immediately spotted a number of distant enemies up in the hills, but no movement in and around the village ahead of us. We started moving into the village to search for the cache. Suicide King, Boberro (i think) and I, spotted an insurgent who foolishly broke concealment less than 50m in front of us. He died quickly. Now we knew the village was occupied for sure, but we still had the advantage of being awesome PMCs, right?
We cleared a couple houses without any further sign of the enemy. I dared to think maybe they just had one scout down here in the village. Immediately the bullets started flying and SuicideKing, who was sweeping the outside of the building while myself and Boberro cleared the inside, was yelling "Shit, they're in the bushes! They're in the bushes! I'm down!" Boberro peaked out the door and took a bullet in the chest, and fell to the ground. I poked my gun out the nearby window and emptied a magazine (or two) into the bunch of reeds/bushes nearest the door. I was rewarded by seeing an enemy rifle fall forward into the open. I patched up Boberro and plunged into the long grass to clear them while he tried to recover SuicideKing - but it was too late for him.
In the history of bad ideas, walking through the reeds, when you KNOW the enemy is using them for ambushes, rates pretty high. But sometimes fortune favors the foolhardy. I walked up on a guy, who from behind, looked friendly. As he turned I realized his hat wasn't "On Brand" so I dumped a mag into him. Maybe he was from Red team, maybe he was an insurgent, maybe he was a lawn care professional in the wrong place at the wrong time. All I know his he wasn't wearing an Ion Storm hat so he had to die. In the response to the gun fire in the bushes Red team decided to throw frags into them. I turned and ran back the way I came as fast as I could, but I still took some shrapnel in my backside. That was going to be hard to explain (no, I wasn't running away from the ENEMY when I got hit in the back, I was running away from Friendlies. I swear!).
In the next five minutes everything went bad. Fire started coming in from the hills and from the houses to our west. As we tried to maneuver and engage people started dying left and right. Suddenly I was alone hiding (cowering?) behind a broken rock wall. Boberro was bleeding out in the street 30m away, but I couldnt' get to him. Alpha lead was down 100m to the east, begging on the radio for someone to come help him tape his guts back on the inside. Someone from Alpha 1 was yelling for help as his team was all down but had found the cache.
I choose to go die in a glorious charge on the cache. As I ran toward the compound Alpha 1 had marked I expected to die from the unseen gun who had killed my team at any second. I guess they thought they got us all because I managed to run across the open ground successfully. Again fortune favored my bad decision. I made it to the wall. Right as I arrived the last man on Alpha 1 called out he was hit and incapacitated. "There is at least one inside, right on the cache. Marker is accurate!". I threw every grenade I had over the wall toward the general direction of the cache marker. I peaked around, saw the cache, saw the disable friendly, and a couple dead insurgents. No one shot me in the face. All good! I moved in and cleared the buildings in the compound, then satisfied it was secure, I rescued the downed friendly.
We proceeded to throw grenades and shoot rockets at the Cache until it was destroyed. One down, one to go. That's right, 1 more cache, an unknown number of enmies, and we had TWO guys left. No problem.
I scavenged as many hand grenades as I could and we started moving north toward the other possible site.
We made it all the way to north end of the compound we were in before we started taking fire! The insurgents had been moving in as we destroyed the cache. At least 3, maybe 4, of them were in the next compound north. The guy from Alpha 1 (whose name I cannot remember, sorry!) did a great job pinning them down in the house while I flanked around to the west. I managed to get right to the house they were inside, and chucked frags through the windows. (this was bad idea number 3. Depending on frags, in Arma, to go throw a small window successfully and for them to be effective). I went through the door after the frags went off to clear the building, when I came back out the door I spotted the last insurgent sneaking off to the east, trying to flank my friends position. A couple rounds down range and problem solved
PMC Wins! And with only two of us left alive our share of the payout was vastly increased