In class this semester, I’m learning how to effectively edit my own and others work. We are starting with a Macro-Edit, a pass through of the story to see if the big picture items are good such as theme, setting, story arc, and character development are up to snuff for the reader. I’m doing a macro-edit on two fellow students 2500 word shorts. My professor allowed me to use my first Breaching Ain’t Easy story so I wouldn’t have to start from scratch. In this episode of “What does an Angry Jumpmaster do when he isn’t writing,” I’ll show the unedited work and then follow up next week with the edits.

I imagine it will get the business!

Here it is in all of its raw unedited glory, and be nice!

MICLICs and Big Bears

My whole life was turned over in September of 2024, along with everyone else’s. New York, Seattle, LA, and DC all ate a nuke from Putin. Xi tried to get jiggy with Taiwan. China still couldn’t figure out how screwed they were after the U.S. Navy executed strikes on Three Gorges Dam. President Biden was an early casualty. West Europe and Russia fought an extreme celebrity death match. My full-ride scholarship for computer design went into the shitter. President Harris signed an executive action to draft all fighting-age Americans between the ages of 18 and 30. We had to register for the draft that was starting in thirty days. Welp, I wanted equality; I hoped I liked it. I was just broken without prospects or rich parents at that time and enlisted anyway.

Basic training at Fort Benning sucked…hard. I wasn’t in bad shape when I started. I was in great shape after, along with the forty or so survivors of my basic and advanced training company. We were all born again hard. We had a mixed-gender basic training and quit thinking about Starship Trooper shower scenes; we were too tired to do anything about sexual tension when we passed out standing in line for chow. One thing about a war going on, the drill sergeants were pissed they were here instead of there, and we paid the bills. I never knew that high-order explosives could do that much damage, or the medics got to scrape you up with a spatula when you guessed wrong.

That was two years ago. I went from private, to sergeant, to battlefield promotion to lieutenant by having a unique talent. I get stuff done and keep my soldiers alive when I can. So, if you are good at work, the Army gives you more crushing responsibility and drinking problems… or is it the other way around? I’d fought my way all over eastern and western Europe for eighteen months…my soldiers called me old school since I was twenty-eight years old compared to the nineteen-year-old average age of WWIII veterans. I’d been a light, Stryker, and air assault combat engineer… Now I got to be Heavy Mech for the largest assault into Eastern Europe since Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. This is some history shit, heavy shit too.

The shaping operations in Syria were on the news, coincidentally on the plains of Armageddon. That put my childhood Bible stories into perspective. This was drawing all the reserves for the Wagner/Russian Army south to deal with the 173d Airborne Brigade jumping in to block anyone from getting out of the Becca Valley while three Marine MEUs with allies made a beach landing to sweep and clear…. they meant search and destroy, kids! Don’t know who got the sticky end of the stick: the guys down south, or us in the 2nd Armored Division, HELL ON WHEELS! Since messing up and moving up was my chosen career path, I was a commander of a Heavy Mechanized Engineer Company with fourteen M1150 Grizzly assault-breaching vehicles. We got the product’s improved version, which was made under license in South Korea, and added a Remote-Control Weapons Station on top with an M2 50 or some automatic grenade launcher for self-protection. The Grizz could carry two mine-clearing line charges on the back to breach defensive belts. It also had a lane-clearing mine plow on the front that just needed to chill out. With 1500 ungoverned horsepower from a freaking turbine jet engine, the Grizz just did the work, or I hoped it worked for our sake.

The plan was simple. The 101st Airborne division, the Screaming Eagles, was going to start the night’s festivities with a division helicopter assault 30 klicks behind the line of scrimmage to disrupt and destroy any reinforcing elements that could get to the front and save the 5th Guards Motorized Rifle Division’s bacon when I violated their forward trace with a Grizz company followed by three armored and two mech infantry brigades. Stryker’s, the thirty-ton eight-wheeled armored vehicles, were going to support our operation with a feint to the north of me, the main effort! Our goal was to reduce at least two defensive belts before passing through the armor or another Heavy Mech Engineer Company to finish the breach. This was a million miles away from computer design and my easy life plan. I wanted a family and kids, and now I didn’t even know if I’d make it through the next twenty-four hours.

My First Sergeant was a bear of a man who was recalled in 2025 after retiring. He was 100% totally and permanently disabled according to the VA, and to compensate for his arthritic-plagued knees, made him stand up in the hatch in a Grizz. He was just stoic, knowing we were going to accomplish our mission tonight or die trying. His bets were on dying tonight… I bet the Old Dirty Bastard a case of Mtn Dew (unobtanium if America switched to a total war economy) that we’d make it. We both laughed after that and finished up a Marlboro Red before nightfall and work started.

Two hours before the H hour, we watched the Slicks and Gunship Helicopters from the 101st start to gray out on the blue force tracker screen in my command Grizz as they crossed the front line of battle and rushed 30k deep into the rear. The night skies were illuminated with the flashing fireworks of preparatory and counter-battery artillery strikes. There were bigger booms on the horizon as Space Force got into the fight with rods from God. I loved rods from God… they were simple and effective. Imagine dropping a six-foot long, 6k kilo tungsten steel rod from an F39 exo-atmospheric fighter from high up in the Earth’s gravity well. Tech seemed to make leaps and bounds when it came to killing each other. Killing was our business, and tonight’s business was going to be good!!

The Russians were getting into the giving spirit too. Explosions started happening on our side of the lines when the Russians did arty raids on troop concentrations while HIMARS was going medieval on counter-battery fire. I ordered the company to go to REDCON (readiness condition) One and button up. We were to start moving to our assault positions in five minutes.

I was trying to follow the action from the Grizz while 1st Squadron 4th Cavalry (heavy), the Quarter Horse, was reconning by fire (or shooting at everything until the Russians returned fire, then piled on) and fighting the counter-recon battle upfront. Counter-recon was just that: wiping out the enemy recon while pinpointing the bad guys for the Corps Commander. Heavy Cavalry was the Corps commander’s eyes forward, gathering real-time intelligence for the assault. The CAV was using M1A3A1 Super Abrams to put in the work, along with robotic tanks with 30mm bushmaster autocannons on them, to clear our way to the first obstacle belt. The “A3A1” was about 70 tons of armor, hate, horsepower, and a 75mm Bushmaster autocannon that chewed up Russian T14 Amata tanks like animal crackers. I was looking through thermals to see outside on our 4th Generation Combat Vehicle Crewmember helmets with visors. Using dumb AI and external cameras, we could use the camera input to “see” through the armor and acquire targets quickly and what was going on around the Grizz without popping out, and having some lucky SOB blow our dumb heads off.

Fritzie, my driver, threaded the needle with this 70-ton behemoth while I talked on Battalion and Company nets to coordinate our actions when we passed through Quarter Horse Squadron. We had guides to lead us through the initial obstacles and minefields, and we crept forward to our final assault position. We passed burning wreckage of A3A1s and Brads along with a butt-ton of Armatas and BMP 4s. The BMP 4 came out of hard lessons that the Russians learned in fighting the Ukraine war in 22-24. It had better armor and protection for the crew and the dismounts. It was built so OSHA wouldn’t have a stroke like the BMP 1/2/3. It had a twin 23mm mount from the Terminator or BMP 72T, and room in the back for a squad. Better armor didn’t mean effective armor, and the BMP 4s popped open and burned when hit like the rest of them.

My Fire Support Officer 1LT Bradshaw had been an artisan baker before the war. Now he used his talents for mixing dough to mix indirect fire into a Picasso of violence. He let me know I had two HIMARS batteries (twelve trucks or seventy-two missiles without a reload) assigned directly to me for immediate suppression of enemy forces at the breech, so I had that duck in the row. 1st Platoon, the Power Tools, were in the lead for the company with my Grizz between them and the Thor’s Hammers, my 2nd Platoon. 1SG was in the rear of them with Hell’s Rejects, my 3rd platoon, the FSO, and Medics. My XO, 1LT Vickers, used to code video games on the West Coast before the nukes. He routinely commented on how he could make a better “game.” He was behind the first Tank Battalion in the assault with three trucks full of MICLICs and other ammo and tankers full of fuel to keep us going.

The 1st Platoon report was being set in assault position 1, and we dispersed off the road to shield us from prying eyes. There was a pair of heavy SHORAD vehicles, a high-tech anti-drone/anti-air weapon system on a modified M2 Bradley Chassis. Both SHORADs went cyclic, shooting everything they had into the air forward of our positions as they started sweeping the sky of enemy drones. I watched the sky to our immediate front turn into a cataclysm of tracers, and small and large explosions when a suicide drone took a fatal hit. Well, that’s great… 1st Platoon was being targeted hard, and I started seeing explosions up front as the Grizz icons went grey on my screen. More explosions and secondaries as the MICLIC boxes went boom on at least one of the Grizzlies. I had to just wait until vehicle and body parts quit falling out of the sky to assess battle damage and casualties. I was on chat with my 1SG and XO so they could get the nine lines started to evacuate the survivors.

One 1st Platoon Grizzly survived the onslaught. That crew had just dismounted and started looking for casualties and began the initial treatment of the wounded. The youngest squad leader just had to grow up fast. SGT Foster and the crew of his Grizzly, The Bear Trap, were doing what they could to argue with death and save their friends. 1SG was pushing forward now with his Grizzly and the Band-Aid track, code-named Boo-Boo, with our company medics. Out of fifteen potential casualties from the three M1150s, SGT Foster found three survivors. That was just a kick in the balls I didn’t need now, but I didn’t have time to do anything but report to higher, retask the remainder of my company, and get ready to cross the main line of battle and screw up some obstacle belts.

Bear Trap, the only surviving vehicle from the 1st Platoon, was mounted back up and joined the 1SG going forward in a trail as Boo-Boo went to the rear with the three casualties from the 1st Platoon, two surgical and one expectant. Two guys had a chance of surviving if they got to a trauma center, but the third guy wouldn’t make the trip, so the medics were administering morphine and fentanyl to ease the soldier’s passing. I mumbled a quick prayer and wondered how many other of my barrel-chested freedom fighters were going to be KILOS (killed in action) tonight.

Thor’s Hammers moved forward to take over the company’s main effort until they reached the final objective or lost all combat power (a euphemism for getting destroyed in detail).

Combat is the cold logic of death and mayhem mixed with the lottery. Win or lose, the best that you can do is put your back into it and see if you make it to the other side. I’d been in my fair share of battles since January of ’25, so I was just doing what I could to keep my kids alive until the battle was over.

We got the electronic go-code while I was coordinating the passage of lines through Quarter Horse. I knew they had a hard night when the current company commander was the company clerk yesterday. This was a kabuki star dance with razors; I mean, it’s hard to do on the fly without rehearsing. CPT (SPC) Connors was a pro. I told him so and wished him the best as we pushed forward, and Thor’s Hammers got in a trailing column formation and started bounding forward with two stationary Grizzes watching two Grizzes moving. My fire support officer was blowing up my radio, sounding constipated with Tourette syndrome. I answer… this guy sounded like a fifteen-year-old boy who just went to second base and was getting called in for the home run. “What can I do for you, FSO?”

“Ma’am, we have to release the HIMARs from our direct support to fire a Corps critical counter-battery mission on some TOR 30s that are chewing up the Screaming Eagles!”

“FSO, was that the good news?”

“No, Ma’am, we got two batteries of Paladin 155s to replace them and they are ready to fire pre-funk fires with DPICM, Willy Pete, and HE delayed on order.”

Oh, FSO, you know how to make a girl happy. “FSO, shoot the prep fires for the breach main effort when 1st Platoon gets to the 1st obstacle belt.” Happily, the FSO went about his work.

thanks for reading and I will see all of you on the Dropzone

!