quote:

The waiting is the worst part.

We've received our briefing, delivered at an hour that not long ago I'd consider absolutely unreasonable to be up at. Now I get to decide if it's worth trying to catch a quick nap before everything starts while nobody's watching to keep from falling asleep. I'm pretty sure I saw one of the Gripen guys taking some kind of pills for this earlier; I'm also pretty sure I wasn't supposed to have seen that. But there are people counting on us, on me, now, so none of that is an option. We're going to take advantage of our absolute annihilation of the Angolan airforce by attacking anything that looks to be remotely of value. There was a long list during the briefing, but I'll be honest, I was only paying half attention to that part - they're still not giving me any weapons. No, my job is much worse.

Turns out in the wake of the thrashing we gave them, the Angolans bought a bunch of SA-11 surface to air systems and now have them patrolling the highways. These things might as well be passive - our ARMs are drat near useless against them. Which means I have to spot the loving things. They don't exactly have a lot of possible places to be, based on our intel, but if I miss one... well, someone's gonna be really angry at me. At least once SAR finds them. To say nothing of the cost of the aircraft.

Speaking of SAR, I still can't believe how great a job those guys did recovering our pilots from Operation Grognard. Everybody made it home. Despite me missing some towed 23mm AAA pieces that cost us two aircraft, things turned out okay in the end. Honestly, when the Angolan attack force turned towards our base, I didn't quite realize what that meant. I watched the red dots disappear from the screen in the trailer one by one, but once we ran out of missiles then I watched in... not horror, more just suspense, as two jets headed straight us. The first got dropped by one of our Pantsir batteries, and I almost forgot I was looking at my own self on the screen until the second jet made a pass and I heard a HAWK launcher next to the trailer fire off a missile. I'm not gonna lie, I crapped myself just a little. That thing is loud as hell, and I've never actually been that close to something that's intending to kill someone before. It suddenly dawned on me that, while the fighter guys can at least eject, all I could do is run. But in that moment of terror I assumed they were carrying chemical warheads, or cluster munitions, or something else that my legs didn't stand a chance of escaping.

So after a moment of reflection I instead stayed at my console the whole time. It felt like an hour until that Flanker got shot down by our SAMs, but I kept calling targets for our allied ground forces the whole time, even after the order to RTB, until the cameras were finally too far away to spot anything. I know one of the Argus crew thanked me for remaining on station when we all got debriefed, but I don't know if those guys told anyone else. Maybe they did, because the fighter guys seem to respect me slightly more now. Or maybe they're just as much aware of what kind of threat those last two jets posed. I still don't think most of them think of me as an equal, but that's okay. I don't have to be. I just need to help them do their job, and if that means I have to sit at this console for 16 straight hours watching for triplets of vehicles with missiles on their tops, then that's what I'll do. Because that's what they need. What the Count needs. What Angola needs.

I still wonder if I had watched myself get splattered by a laser-guided bomb on the screen if that would have counted as irony or a just fate. I guess I don't know. Maybe I never will. But I do know that I can die as easily as anyone else here. And I know what that means for me.

My name is MEAT. I'm here to help win back this country. And with all of us, with me, I know we will.