I wrote a fictional diary for a soldier in a strange crisis.

[notgeogzm]

:siren: This isn't going to be amazing, in fact rather terrible. It's just something I kept adding on to and it is not finished. It probably won't ever get finished. I relied on the internet for any information I needed (military squads, guns and all that shit) so if it is incorrect I apologize. :siren:

This is written from the view of a soldier in the British Army. There are also fictional technologies too. [b]This is also supposed to be readable by people who aren't familiar with military shit, so that's why I put things in like 'a lynx is a helicopter' and stuff.[/b]

Downbarrel
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Chapter One: Accidental Contingency
March 20, 2012

I'm not very good at easing in, so I suppose I'll just get straight to the point. My name is Tony Slant, and I'm a soldier stationed in Yvolget, a city in Naruveq. If you're another person and you've found this diary, well done. You're a winner. At the moment, the conflict between Beston, the smaller yet more powerful country to the east, and Naruveq, the large land I'm stationed in at current, is escalating like an elevator out of control. Basically, the situation is, a few weeks ago some miners from Yvolget found some weird rock deep underground, and apparently it contains an element which hasn't been found before. They took their findings in to the capitial of Beston, and of course, this element is ridiculously unstable and the chunk of rock that they're flashing around like a torch explodes, and takes down about a quarter of the city with it. Obviously this makes the whole world curious about the element, however Beston and Naruveq have got one hell of a history. Wars, embargoes, everything. So the military of Beston was sent to the mines where this element, currently deemed 'Destium', was found, and they couldn't find any traces of it, which led them to believe that the country of Naruveq actually sent this 'element' over to disguise a nuclear bomb designed to take out quarter of the capital city. Just in case you're lost and don't pick up foreign names, Naruveq is a country, Yvolget is the capital of Naruveq and Beston is a country to the east of Naruveq.

Anyway, because the people of Beston think that the Destium was a bomb, they went and sent in a huge assault via land and air, and it wasn't pretty. After about 3 days of fighting I heard from my corporal that our whole company was being sent in to Yvolget to fight against Bestonian forces. I suppose I should tell you a bit about my squad.

First of all, there's my fireteam. Obviously, there's me, Tony. I'm a private, and I carry around an L85 most of the time. There's not a lot I can write about myself, maybe I'll get one of the other guys to do it at some other time. Next up, there's Kenny. I've known him since secondary school and we both joined the army at the same time. He lugs around an FN Minimi, which earns him the nickname Rambo. His crew-cut makes him look a lot stronger than his old mop did, I'll admit. Next up there's Nico. I met him as soon as I was put in to my fireteam and he's a bit of a geek, to be honest. He carries an L86, and he never shuts up about how the gun makes him 'chafe in his netherreigons'. When we were still in the barracks he used to do a bunch of prop comedy crap, but it did keep us entertained. Finally, there's our corporal, Roy. He's fairly cool most of the time, but he shoots through the roof when he's pissed off. I don't like breaking a streak, so I'm gonna write down that he carries around an L85, like me, except he gets an under-slung grenade launcher. I try not to get jealous. His glasses and his light facial hair make him look like the kind of person you'd expect to find in a coffee shop, not shooting down angry western europeans.

Then there's the other fireteam, but I'm not describing all of those guys right now. For a start, I don't know them that well at all. They lost one of their guys on the way in to the city. I should really get some sleep though, so I'm going to write another entry tommorow. However, we've got to go out and defend the border tommorow, and the trip's kind of long, so I won't be writing until the day is over. Hey, maybe I'll have some nice, sugar-coated death to tell you about. Who knows.

March 21, 2012

We took a long-ass flight to the border today. Both of our fireteams were cramped on to one lynx (it's a helicopter for anybody who may read this diary in future), so the ride wasn't comfy either. We landed just outside the eastern side of the Leritan forest, which is a massive forest in Naruveq. Quite a sight. There were other squads from our platoon waiting there as well. A barricade had been constructed and there were soldiers scattered around everywhere, watching out, carrying rations in, driving in and out and lounging around. For about an hour nothing happened, and then we heard the sound of helicopter blades in the distance. Like a flock of hungry seagulls, a large group of Bestonian helicopters were flying in the distance, many of them landing and dropping off soldiers, others hovered around like flies to a trashcan. By now, our whole company was ready at the border. I was on top of the barricade, ready to fire. I heard our captain yell "Contact!" and I knew then that I was about to net my first kill. I had my eyes on a soldier immidately, this one Bestonian guy who looked pretty scared. Even from 600 meters away, I could see him shaking as he ran up to us. Bullets were already travelling to and fro so I had no problem firing, however I empathized with the guy. He looked like he didn't want to be in this war, like he had been forced in. He probably had a family to care for, maybe he wasn't very well off? What if I shot him, would that mean I had just doomed a poor family? I decided not to think. By now he was about 550 meters away, which my gun's sight could just about manage. I aimed carefully and as I gently squeezed the trigger, I felt refreshed. I saw him tumble like a bowling pin. As he lay motionless on the ground, none of his comrades offered to help, nobody went by to his side to heal him. He just lay there. Dying. I had to call it.
"That's a kill." I said. I didn't feel any sense of excitement or dissapointment as you would expect. I just looked for the next target. As I looked, however, an RPG fired in the distance, and as I followed it with my eyes, I could only watch it dance in to the left side of the wall. I saw our squad's entire second fireteam die, right there, along with a few scattered other soldiers. Yet I felt nothing. Maybe if it was my own, I would feel something. The Bestonians began to break through, however. I stopped firing, whilst others kept on. Roy was told on his radio that we were being pulled out, and me, Roy, Kenny and Nico began to sprint through the woods. Other squads also began to pull out as tanks arrived and began to unload their fire on the border. We arrived at the landing zone and got aboard yet another lynx, and as we flew away we could see more and more Bestonians coming in to the country. I thought about that first person that I shot. Was he still lying there? Is he dead? Did he get taken away? I didn't want to think about it, but the thought leeched itself in to my mind. We got back to our outpost deep in Yvolget safe and sound, however. So today was eventful, and not so pretty. We're stationed here overnight as well, so I'm not expecting any sleep.

March 23, 2012

So I didn't write an entry last night. I was too tired. Let me continue from my last entry. I fell asleep at around five in the morning yesterday, as there hadn't been any action. Kenny woke me up at seven o' clock, only two hours later, because apparently there were Bestonian forces less than 20km away. I suppose you want to know a little more about our outpost. We were stationed in this barricaded-off area, in an underground car park. There were only a few cars left in there, which a few of us decided to sleep in. Others just used the tents we had been supplied with. I shared my tent with Kenny and Corporal Hartfield (Roy told me to stop calling him by his first name, and seeing as he reads this, I'd better comply.), where as Nico slept in some abandoned SUV with broken windows on the other side of the car park. There were assorted fold out chairs and tables containing food, weapons, maps and other general assorted stuff in rows in the middle of the car park too. The ramp up to the next floor was guarded 24/7 by two guys, and the next floor up contains a few of our own vehicles. It's like a home away from home. Anyway, on to what happened during the day. At around 8:20am, we heard gunfire not too far away and we could see the occasional flash of light, like an explosion. Hartfield told us to get our weapons and get topside, so I grabbed my L95 and a few other bits and bobs that don't really matter and headed on up with my fireteam. On the way up, me, Kenny and Nico conversed.
Of course, Nico began. "Yesterday was fucking intense, I can't believe the whole second fireteam got their asses beat. RIP."
"Yeah, I'm more worried about the guys who weren't given clearance to get the hell out, there had to have been like 5 tanks there. That one helicopter ripped up the entire place as well, nobody could have gotten out alive." Kenny replied.
"I saw that thing, it was a god damn beast! There was a land rover trying to drive away from the border, and the helicopter fired one little missile at it and it did like 6 fucking rolls, it was ridiculous!" Nico said.
"Just be grateful that we were fortunate enough to be called back to a helicopter. If we had to escape in anything else, we would probably have been snapped up by that helicopter." I added.
"Hey, look, there's our ride."
We arrived, and saw what Nico had deemed 'our ride'. There was a rather hopeless looking SUV, and Hartfield was leaning out of the window, looking for us. We clambered in, and I called shotgun. We waited around 5 minutes for the rest of our shabby convoy to arrive, and then we set out through the streets of downtown Yvolget. About 9km in to our journey, we stopped and our vehicle became part of a small barricade. We took up positions in a building which had been hit by where the people of Naruveq had been rioting and waited for the Bestonians to come. It only took them about 10 minutes and there were just as many as we had predicted. There were 3 Urals with about 7 troops in the back of each, with a further two more in front, totalling at about 26-28 men. We had around 50 men so they were easily outnumbered. I killed only one man today. He wore a balaclava and what I think was a skating helmet, which leads me to believe that this definitely wasn't the best of the Bestonians. Upon searching through the dead, I noticed that they were just part of one of the many small militias which had been tricked in to sacrificing themselves here, rather than being sent as the fully-fledged soldiers we were expecting, they had been sent as bait. About 3 minutes after we finished scouting their corpses, we heard a strange, ominous roar from an extremely short distance away. Several soldiers wearing some kind of new armor came walking with an extremely advanced tank, and they began to fire upon us with normal rifles. Our gunshots didn't even dent their exoskeletons. We panicked and a few of us started to run away, with some kind of newfound disdain for their job as a soldier. I hid out of sight, thinking that running was the wrong idea. Their tank's cannon turned slowly towards the building adjacent to mine, where Hartfield and most of the other squads were. The cannon fired, and a strange kind of payload hit the building, first of all exploding, but then I noticed something. The air felt cold and eerie, like a breezy winter day. The building began to freeze up at a fast yet rapidly declining rate, with around a quarter of it completely covered in ice after 30 seconds. I couldn't believe my eyes. Hartfield, and half of our remaining soldiers, were dead. Frozen like a pond.

At the moment, I'm in hiding and shock. I'll write more later, if I can.

Chapter Two: Thermuveq
??? 2012, presumably March 24-25

I'm not sure where I am at the moment. There's a lamp here, and it's warm. A radiator is keeping me heated too, but my head hurts a lot. There's a bandage on my face as well and I keep getting migraines, but I'm lucky to be alive after what happened. After I stopped writing, I knew I had to run, but there was nothing I could do. The road where the Bestonian tank had come from obviously had the tank on it, the road to the left was in plain view of it, there was a barricade of vehicles behind me, and to the right there were more militias approaching. I could still see others trying to escape, just being picked off like scabs and left to decompose. I just watched, hoping the Bestonians would pass by. I turned around and my eyes laid upon a sight which froze me completely with fear. One of the soldiers had climbed the rubble which led up to my post in mere seconds. I could vaguely recall seeing an eye behind a small computer, piercing my mind and inducing fear in to my very body. I dropped my weapon and put my hands up, but this man didn't care. He simply took two steps towards me and swung a painfully powerful punch in to my face. I blacked out, but I'm guessing he assumed I was dead when he saw me motionless on the floor. I don't remember anything else after that apart from waking up and feeling wretched here. There's a TV in the corner of the room, quite an expensive one by the looks of it, however all the buttons are in Russian (the de facto language of Naruveq and Bestonia) so I can't turn on the TV. This bed is ridiculously comfortable compared to the sleeping bag I slept in whilst I was residing in the car park, it's really quite soft. From what I can tell, this room has been undergoing decoration work of some sort recently, because there's a bucket of white paint in the corner, and there isn't any carpet, just wooden planks. The curtains are drawn over the window, which is next to the TV. All I can see outside is a dimly-lit courtyard, which is absolutely stunning. All kinds of wonderful plants are living out there. The light appears to be reflected from the moon. I'm going to go to sleep again now, however, because there's nothing else to do.

25 March 2012

Today was quite a peaceful day. Let me start from the beggining.

I woke up at about eleven in the morning, feeling rather refreshed. I felt the energy to get up, but I decided to stay in bed a little longer. By some stroke of luck, I managed to turn on the TV to a channel which was subtitled in English. There was some gardening program on, but I turned over to the news, also suprisingly subtitled. Reports on the war were going on, and it dawned on me that this news report wasn't coming from Naruveq, it was coming from France. I didn't realize this until I woke up a little more and noticed all the French words and accents. There was no mention of the ice cannon or any exoskeletons, just that the Bestonians had pushed through to the capital and captured the prime minister of Naruveq. I began to think about Nico and Kenny, wether they had got out alive or not. I decided not to, just in case.

After the news started reporting about 'kitten farms', I decided to open my door and take a walk around the abode I found myself stranded in. I had no shoes on, just some tracksuit bottoms which weren't mine and the grey tee that I wore under my normal armor. I was in a corridor which had red carpet and walls covered in wooden finish. Paintings were on the walls, and another expensive TV which was tuned in to BBC worldwide rested on the corner of the corridor. I turned and found the door to the courtyard that I had laid eyes on last night was open. I decided to stroll through and noticed a man, roughly in his fifties, sat on a bench eating from a bowl. He turned to me. All I could say was "Hi." The middle aged man seemed aware of every move I made, simply saying "So, you have recovered?"
"Yeah."
"Good, good. You are a long way away from the battlefield, do not worry about your safety. Now, are you hungry?"
"I suppose so."
The man spoke in a slavic accent, and had an experienced way of talking. I assumed he was the owner of this large property. We began to walk and talk.
"So, where am I?" I said.
"You are in my home, which will also serve as your home for now, my friend."
"How did I get here?"
"You were dumped in a corpse truck, ready to be burned in some kind of fire. The soldiers did a brief check to see if any were dead, and you were the only one to turn up alive. You were treated and held in a cell whilst being tended to, and then I requested to take you in here."
"Why?"
"That isn't important, at least, not yet. Do you think all that advanced technology yesterday was of Bestonian descent?"
"I assumed so seeing as it followed that militia so closely."
"Guess again."
"Which country owns those tanks?"
"We're unsure, but we think they may be from an extremely high-end illegal PMC hired by Naruveq's military."
"Shit, really?"
"The squad that attacked you was one of 5 sighted around Naruveq. Soldiers managed to take photographs of them, some even managed to get pictures of the soldiers. We're going to study these pictures and determine where this comes from."
"So...I'm in Beston at the moment?"
"Yes, you're in Beston. You're a long way away from Naruveq though, so don't worry about armed forces coming through. I still haven't introduced myself though. My name is Nikolai Malakachev, I was a sargeant in the Beston Armed Forces for twenty years. I still work with various people at the BAF to help progress our conflicts, as after I served twenty years I went in to a more technical job working at a comm center. Only last year did I retire."
"Nice to meet you, Nikolai. I'm Tony. Tony Slant. I served in the British Armed Forces for 4 days and now I'm in your house."
"Ah ha ha, a private you are Tony. Good. Anyway, here is the dining room."

I was presented with a large, majestic room with more wooden and red decor. Several small tables were scattered around, and a larger table was fixed at the other end of the room. A woman of about twenty came in with two cooked breakfasts on trays, and placed them on one of the smaller tables.
"Thank you, Anna. This is my daughter, Anna. She is staying here until the conflict in Naruveq is resolved."
"Nice to meet you, Anna." I said.
"It is good to meet you, um..."
"Tony."
"Tony, yes. Enjoy your breakfast, and I hope you have recovered well."
Anna's English was slower and her accent was thicker, however it was still admirable for a second language. She had a phone strapped to her wrist, and she had some expensive jewelery around her neck, which suggested that Nikolai had a good enough relationship with his daughter to buy her expensive items.
"So, Tony, what do you plan to do during your further time here?"
"I'm not quite sure, at the moment. I suppose I should figure out a way to get back in to combat, however my NCO was killed by that tank, and I have no idea what became of my other squadmates."
"I hope for your sake they are okay."
"So do I. I've been keeping a journal of recent events if you're interested in reading it. There isn't much so far."
"Yes, I would be very much interested to have a look. In fact, I could read it after this wonderful breakfast my lovely daughter has prepared for us."

The breakfast was truly of a wonderful stature. There were various kinds of cold-cut ham, along with an omelet and some other tidbits. It was great to eat something a little more substantial than tinned food. After breakfast, I showed Nikolai my reports so far and he seemed to understand the situation just that much more. It's three in the afternoon now and I'm back on my bed, trying to figure out how to find Nico and Kenny. I'll write some more later.

[b]----[/b]

So that's that for now. It isn't anything good at all, I've just added to it bit by bit recently and for military information I just used wikipedia, so if any army stuff isn't correct then it's because I'm relying on google and wikipedia. I also used wikipedia for a few other things too.