[AAR] A day in Lashkar (Warning: Lots of text)

[Pronck]

Note: This AAR is slightly dramatized for entertaining purposes.

I never forget this game I am going to tell you about. Well practically seen it is just a big intense firefight in the valley of Lashkar. It happened a few months ago, somewhere in March. Back then I started playing PR again from a brief pause since December 2011.
I was a German soldier, member of a normal infantry squad. I was the ?normal? grunt playing with a rifleman kit. We had blown up 2 caches before, one we stumbled on by accident. The other one got blown up by an APC pounding a compound. After we went back to our main base for rearming and reloading our squad leader got intel on a possible weapon cache at the main village, west of the river. There was a lot of activity going on there and most of the people were concentrated near ?the green zone?. A bunch of fields and compounds with some tree lines that stretches from 200 meters north of the main base all the way to the village. One squad already went forward with an APC towards the village by using the main road. This was a death trap, the APC got ambushed and the infantry fled into the green zone were they set-up a perimeter in a nearby compound. Meanwhile we started to move up towards the edge of the green zone. It was quite. There were no signs of enemy activity whatsoever. Some people would call it suspicious. We were nearly 50 meters from the secured compound when we got our first contact. The sniper fire we attracted was inaccurate but in some way warned us that we would meet quite some enemies in the near future. What we didn?t knew was that this sniper reported our location and that the enemy team sent reinforcements to that compound. A minute later both squads moved up, we secured the rear and the other squad secured the point. Not more than a few seconds later mortars started to hit the compound we just left. It turned out that the Taliban took that compound back a minute later and that we were surrounded by approximately 25 enemies.

I was taking a bite of my chocolate chip cookie and then we heard the cracks and shots going off in the distance. The squad in front of us took heavy small arms fire. At that same moment we received RPG fire from the rear. We suddenly realized that we got ambushed. A grenade took out our AR right of the bet. We lost our best piece of equipment. But we didn?t hear him asking for a medic. When we were 10 meters further he started to scream for a medic. Our medic wanted us to clear it up first, I went forward with the specialist. He threw a grenade in a ditch, I quickly toggled my G36 to full auto and fired a burst. That ditch got cleared, the AR was black and white, in military terms ?combat ineffective? . I got hit from behind, a Taliban cleared his mag but didn?t realized that deviation existed, and only hit me once and the AR twice. I turned around, shot him in the head and told the medic to come. However, the medic got shot into 50.000 pieces by a PKM. I patched myself up, the specialist helped me. We reloaded to fight our way back to the medic. He was in the middle of the field. My SL and the grenadier were now smoking the hill side since we received lots of RPG fire from there. The SL gave a quick sitrep about what happened. We took contact from a big force that was ready to engage. The squad in the front was pinned down and cut off. They had 2 casualties that were not revive-able due to the location of the body. Our objective was to reinforce this squad, fight off the enemy and hold ground until reinforcements in the form of armored vehicles would arrive. The APC that was supposed to help us was also receiving RPG fire and had a hard time getting to us due to all the mines and IEDs.

I got the medic back on his feet while a RPG flew over and nearly blew up our SL. He doubted if we could the AR back up without losing too much time. The medic convinced him that if the specialist escorted him that it would work. I thought that the cut-off squad wasn?t that far, well it was a wrong thought. They had secured a compound, but it was surrounded by Taliban, it took sporadic mortar fire and it was always taking heavy small-arms fire. When we started to fight our way to it we had a good message. Reinforcements will be going to lay down suppressing fire from the big hill West of the village. Our moral got higher after we stumbled upon enemies between our lines a few minutes before. Now we got a chance to survive this. I shot some burst into the bushes to clear up a little path towards the compound, I hit a guy who ran off it turned out I killed a PKM guy in that bush too. I kept shooting and shooting until the number of my clips hit 3. I had no ammo bag left, the nearest rifleman was in the compound at the other squad and between him and me there were up to 18 Taliban fighters ready to kill us. SL found some cover to gather weapons and ammo only 50 meters from the compound entrance. Behind a small dirt hill we reloaded our weapons and gathered all the smokes we had. After the smoke screen popped up we ran for our lives, bullets were flying past us, RPGs hit the compound we were going for, my adrenaline started pumping. When I arrived at the compound we realized how much luck we had. We saw some bodies in the compound, our medic started doing his job and I got into position. The sound of Hueys landing on the hill above us gave the feeling that we were getting the upper hand. For a moment the fire stopped, it was the moment to call mortars. They were danger close, some airburst even blew up above the compound hitting us, but it was effective.

On the hill observers reported reinforcements coming out of their main and from the East side of the river. Our squads quickly gathered around and pulled out to a compound in the village overlooking the bridges. The cache location got confirmed at that time, it was across the street. But some Taliban were still hiding in that compound. Well we got a solution for that: C4. The engineer crossed the street stuck the C4 to the wall but got shot at the door of our compound. I dragged the kit from the street, bullets hit the ground in front of me. The medic smoked up the street to get the engineer back up. All that C4 fixed the problem for a little bit, the cache got blown up with the compound walls giving the Taliban no cover. All the fire from the hill relieved some pressure from us, and the APC that was suppressing the compounds east of the river also helped us enormously. However, not me. An enemy sneaked up on the compound wall and threw a grenade at my feet. I got blown up, got revived fought back. I got hit again a few seconds later but I made it.

My ammo was really low. I had one mag in the gun and no spare mags. SL told us that if we held back the enemy for a few more minutes that the Huey could pick us up. There was only 1 problem. We had to blow up a wall so he could land without crushing his tail into a wall of dried mud and donkey poo. The Huey tried twice to give us supplies the first one landed on the wrong compound the second one was excellent. We blew up the wall. People called out enemies but I couldn?t shoot, like 4 other guys. The blast of the c4 blowing up the wall destroyed the crate. I got assigned to the first Huey, my SL and 3 others would stay there for the next pick-up and to defend the LZ. When I jumped in the Huey I felt relieved. It were intense 20 minutes of fighting while I had to take a ****. The pilot flew northbound and flew back at that moment I saw how the compound got overrun and how my SL shot his last mag into a Taliban fighter before getting shot in the face.

It was a fight I never experienced before, it was intense, I didn?t got hit that much as I am used to and I enjoyed every moment. When you release what happened it was just a ?PR firefight? but the way I had written it is the way it felt to me. Some things didn?t really happened as I told. The mortar fire wasn?t that effective and the amount of enemies might have been lower and things like that. But the impression it made realized why I like this game, this kind of rare firefights and intense battles mixed up with moments of rest and long walks to the frontline.

[dogmaster]

When i start reading your story about your intense fire fight,
I want to play PR right away!

Goed verhaal xD

Greets,

Dogmaster

[Pronck]

Thank you, my grammar isn't that well but the majority of the readers should be able to understand it.