Considering they were used to clean up operations like Black Mesa and had (then) cutting edge technology unavailable to the wider military like the PCV and NV-equipped gas masks, along with 'elite weaponry' like Desert Eagles I'd honestly say they were an XCOM-tier clandestine slash spec ops outfit unheard of outside their unit and upper echelons of command. Black Mesa is the kind of incident the USA was willing to nuke its own soil to cover it up, so the odds are it was black-tier, with the black ops themselves being blacker-than-black.
Don't forget the HECU were originally CIA rather than USMC -- which shows the gravitas of what the HECU were sent to do.
I know that it can be non-canon, but it's disputable that power charged armors are secret cutting edge technology. There're civilian chargers in Opposing Force.
Somewhat interestingly, CBRN units didn't really seem to exist before the 2000s. So Valve were kind of going in blind with that one.
They were brought on largely by the Gulf War and the threat of WMD's from Middle Eastern nations, along with the ideal of a 'dirty bomb'. There were specialized CBRN individual squads and units in the Gulf War, but they were more a de facto thing rather than an established unit. Also, the blokes stationed in the Fulda Gap and West Germany during the Cold War were the prototype for it. Imagine being the poor fucker who had to disarm the nuclear landmines afterward.
This is true, although the civilian chargers have just standard civilian plugs on them, which makes me think the PCV has adapters for wall-plugs rather than powered chargeable armor. There's absolutely no other evidence that anything other than the PCV and the HEV existed, at any point in time. From what you see of them even the Black Ops don't use the PCV or an equivalent -- though that's debatable, indeed. The Combine also don't have any indication of powered armor -- though one has a case if the Overwatch armor is powered or not, it's unclear. The Civil Protection flak vests are very clearly not powered, though.
I would honestly say that powered armor is in the minority in the HL 'verse, and I would say they're cutting edge, though I doubt they're very secret, just expensive. As it stands, good-quality armor and plates will cost you in the realm of a hundred or so, to several hundred. When you factor in the fact that those are one-time, one-use plates that you will discard even if you take a .22 to the chest (at least logically), factor in the fact that the HEV is an all-encompassing HAZMAT suit with bodily-enhancement properties, and the fact that the PCV is clearly meant to be a part of CBRN gear (some HECU models even have the CBRN flap on their gas mask collars) then you can assume the tech's gonna be expensive as fuck, at least enough that you wouldn't see it outside of say, Black Mesa or the HECU.
Considering Black Mesa was retconned to be a private company and the HECU was specifically geared for Black Mesa as an attached corps then I'd say the tech's probably proprietary to them-- there's no indication anyone else ever made any other HEV equipment. Even Aperture don't seem to have anything on the same scale, although Aperture seemed to be less involved in the military-industrial complex, beyond the once-mentioned androids and gun turrets-- and an equivalent to the gun turrets exists in Black Mesa.
I think of them as maybe not special forces, but specialist forces. They are a Commando unit comprised of elite infantry which specialize in Direct Action, CQB, Abseiling/Fast Roping, and all things CBRN.
There's also a Health and HEV Charger in one of the Aperture Science comics. On the other hand, the civilian charger could just be a generic generator that you're able to interface with, since it has outlets on it.
Doesn't the drill sergeant outright state in the armour tutorial that the PCV can recharge from a variety of power sources, both military and civilian?
Yes, and as I said, those civilian outlets in the training course are literally HEV chargers with normal two-pin power plugs on them.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/images/6/68/Hevcharger2_1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090325212237&path-prefix=en
So my doubt is that they're built to charge HEV/PCB suits, and more high-throughput energy outlets for civilian high-load gear, that Shepard/etc can charge from because the PCV itself has an adapter.
I kinda love this worldbuilding the HL games have, that you pretty much don't ever see anymore. Having a whole third charger type in the tutorial that never appears anywhere in the game, just because it would make sense from a lore perspective, is simply incredible. Its details like that that make the HL world so alive we still speculate on it on an online forum 20 years later.
what kind of bootcamp orders you to stand infront of a bloodied wall and willingly get shot by a fellow marine with live shells though?
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109910/e65f0ed9-96da-4356-b4b6-cf88fbcf6372/image.png
A very hardcore one.
The live fire course is loosely based on real training, since a long time ago they used to do stuff like that, but they had the guns locked to a certain angle, and you would have to crawl through mud with some really thick wire on top of you so you couldn't stand up without cutting it.
Live fire exercises are common IRL and there's usually a couple casualties from it every year. Military training as a whole usually ends up being a healthy (if such a word can be used) source of casualties for a standing army. You can read some info on it in this MOD document I found.
as you can see, you are not dead
"But you've now got six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, internal bleeding, and an intestinal rupture. OORAH MARINES, DEBBIW DAWGS! YEEHAW!"
suit'll fix it
When you get the HEV suit, Kleiner says it's adapted to Combine power chargers which are 'plentiful wherever they patrol'. I would think that the combine do have power armor. However the Combine chargers could be for charging any equipment they have, such as they're radios.
ARE YOU TOUCHIN ME DIRTBAG?!
He calls them "Combine Energy Outlets" though, he never implies that they're meant to be used for charging armor other than the fact that he modified the HEV to interface with them.
I think of them as portable generators, and you just sap all the energy from them because your suit is drawing power at 1/100's efficiency or someshit.
I feel like the Combine outlets are something that Valve legitimately didn't consider in the least and are just completely a gameplay convention-- as is the Kleiner voice line, since Kleiner's voice actor worked purely in-house at the time of HL2's recording sessions (see their steam answering machine message and his 'oh fiddlesticks' line being used a lot elsewhere) like Rick May purportedly used to be, it wouldn't have been hard to re-record that to cover up a gameplay crack. Until the late stages of the game's dev cycle, the chargers were still just updated HEV chargers, and as far as I know no proof has surfaced of earlier suit chargers, only health ones. Maybe they used to do both?
The way I see it in, here's what we known about the hgrunts...
1) Early concept:
Concept art called them "CIA Soldiers", while story synopsis called them 'Cleaners'. Some of them were very outlandish, with psionic powers and weapons.
2) During alpha stages:
Black Mesa was a military base, and the human enemies were the US Army soldiers stationed there. They weren't special forces, in the same way that you wouldn't expect the Air Force soldiers that guard Area 51 to be special forces. (You don't employ special forces to stand around on guard all day - you use regular troops that have been very carefully vetted.)
The alpha hgrunts all wore gasmasks, although there were also cigar-smoking sergeants with miniguns. The Barneys were military as well - they had 'MP' on their helmets (Military Police) - and they were hostile to the player too, they were the lower-tier human enemy, armed only with pistols.
The grunts were given 'anti-camo' uniforms that looked like a military camouflage pattern, but which actually helped to make them stand out against grey concrete walls. Valve also experimented with an alternative yellow-and-brown desert camo look, but decided to stick with the black & white urban camo.
The grunts were also given green equipment pouches, and green gasmask lenses. These green patches helped the grunts to be easily visible, and was also consistent with the real US Army, which has desert-camo and arctic-camo variations for clothing, while normally didn't bother making alternative versions of flak jackets and pouches. (As demonstrated by those photos earlier in the thread - US Soldiers in the Gulf War had desert camo uniforms but their flak jackets and equipment pouches are all woodland green.)
3) Beta stages and retail release:
Black Mesa became a civilian-run facility, with civilian security guards, doing top-secret research for the government and military. The hgrunts were a special forces team sent in to respond to the disaster.
The manual describes them as a 'ruthless and efficient clean-up crew', and the manual calls the MP5 'the Navy Seals sub-machine gun'. Everyone's heard of the Navy Seals, so saying that they use Navy Seals weaponry, and that they are 'ruthless and efficient', gives the impression of them being special forces.
We don't get to see the faces of the regular gasmask troops or the shotgunners with balaclavas, but we do see the faces of the squad leaders, and the cigar-smoking grenade-launcher troops. Their lined, battle-worn faces suggest that they are grizzled veterans. The cigar-smokers have some grey patches.
This makes sense. You need to have proven yourself as a badass regular soldier before you get promoted to any of the real-world special forces units, whether they are Army, Navy Seals, or Air Force. And this is a unit so elite that they are trusted for government cover-up operations - killing both aliens and civilian witnesses.
What's more, all indications are that the grunts are a top-secret ARMY special forces unit. The Apache helicopters are labelled 'ARMY', the Osprey heliplanes have got the Army star on the wings, and the military trucks have got Army stars on them as well. And the squad leaders wear red berets.
From the 1980s until 2001, there were only three types of US troops who wore berets:
1) Army Rangers - black berets (now changed to tan)
2) Army Special Forces - green berets, in fact they are nicknamed 'The Green Berets'
3) Army Airborne Divisions - red berets (based on the red berets worn by British paratrooper regiments)
The only one of these that the general public are familiar with are 'The Green Berets', Army Special Forces.
So my thinking is that Valve's Chuck Jones gave the hgrunts red berets to give them 'that special forces look' and make them a fictional alternative to the real-world Green Berets that everyone has heard of. (In a pre-wikipedia era, chances are that Valve were not aware that some American paratroopers wear red berets.) Plus, the red beret really helps the squad leaders to stand out, part of the whole 'anti-camo' idea.
4) Opposing Force
Opfor was about fighting alongside the hgrunts, and also Opposing Force was intended for computers with higher system specs, that could play the game at a decent resolution. Gearbox's Stephen Bahl overhauled the grunts, making them more detailed and with equipment that was more recognisably similar to modern US soldiers.
Valve's fake 'anti-camo' was replaced with authentic-looking urban camo. The helmets on the gasmask grunts were changed to looks like the real helmets used by the US military. Berets were changed to black rather than red. The exception is the commander who orders everyone to pull out on the radio, he has a green beret. A bit weird - that's a mismash of Army Rangers and Army Special Forces - but I guess it could be explained away by saying that the Commander is a former green beret... and likes to wear his old hat. (Of course really it's just to make him distinctive.)
Veterans or Newbies?
Opposing Force seems to scrap the idea that the grunts are an elite special forces unit of grizzled combat veterans. The opfor grunts seem far more youthful. During the intro Osprey ride, one of the grunts questions why they haven't received their orders yet, and the commander shouts "Do you have a problem, private?"
You play as a 22-year old Corporal - which is just one rank about a Private - and during the rest of the game this is high-ranking enough to be squad leader and order around almost every grunt that you come across. If the majority of the grunts are just privates, that means they've barely completed basic training and haven't seen any action yet whatsoever.
(Gearbox did fix that a bit in their HD pack for Blue Shift, and the PS2 version. Although the HD squad leaders and grenadiers have the new-look equipment from Opposing Force, their faces look like they are in their 30s at least. But the HD versions of the Opfor soldiers still look quite young.)
Back in the alpha versions of Half-Life, when Black Mesa was a military base and the grunts were troops stationed there, it would have made sense for the regular troops to be young privates and corporals, and for the special boss enemies to be sergeants. But in the final game Valve had changed the grunts into an elite special operations force. And you wouldn't expect to see anyone below the rank of Sergeant in any US military special forces. You don't become a Ranger or Delta Force or Navy Seal right after finishing basic training!
During the intro ride, one grunt says 'This had better not be another search and rescue operation', implying that they've seen a bit of action, but it wasn't very exciting. Another says they think it is going to be a 'babysitting job', implying they'll be providing some 'just-in-case' protection to scientists or government officials. But one of the random things that friendly grunts can say is "Some first mission this turned out to be!"
My guess is that the HECU has been around for a while, perhaps a year or two, long enough for them to have one or two minor operations. They get called in when there's some kind of potential danger at a research facility or nuclear plant, but they haven't yet encountered any actual enemies, they've not had to fight anyone. (Or anything.) A bit like any real life military unit that is specialised in Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Operations... unless someone sets off a dirty bomb, they don't have much to do, and spend their time doing lots of training operations.
But in the month or two leading up to Black Mesa, the government or G-Man knew or suspected there was a danger of an incident at Black Mesa, and they recruited a bunch of newbies to expand the HECU and make it a more sizeable fighting force. This included Shepard and a number of his buddies
Evidence for hgrunts being Marines
Adrian Shephard's character bio in the aircraft says that his training was United States Marine Corps, Special Forces. And one of the random phrases that friendly grunts can shout is "Let's go, Marines!"
There's no such thing as 'United States Marine Corps, Special Forces'. The Army, Navy and Air Force all have several Special Operations Forces, and they all come under SOCOM - Special Operations Command. There's also JSCOC, Joint Special Operations Command, which handles missions where the various different special forces need to work together. But back in 1998 and 1999 the Marines didn't have a SOCOM or JSCOC element. The Marines didn't want to be a part of it, they liked being their own separate independent thing. (Until the Marines got annoyed that they were left out of big operations in Afghanistan, where Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy Seals, and the CIA Special Operations Group all worked together to take out Taliban strongholds in the mountains, and so they joined SOCOM in 2006.)
However, the Marines did have (and do still have) marine expeditionary units that are 'Special Operations Capable Forces'. Despite the similar name, this doesn't refer to the sort of Special Operations done by Green Berets, Navy Seals, Delta Force etc. (And the only bit of the US military that refer to themselves as 'special forces' is US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets.)
But still, we can be generous and pretend that Shephard's previous experience was in one of these USMC Special Operations Capable Forces.
Evidence for hgrunts being Army
Marines have never worn berets. They call their medical officers 'corpsmen' instead of medics. They don't use the Army star on any of their equipment or vehicles. In fact, their aircraft and trucks are actually labelled with the word 'MARINES' or 'USMC'.
Opposing Force's manual is entitled 'A Soldier's Handbook', and repeatedly uses the term 'soldier' throughout. The second page says "You are now a member of the Armed Forces of the United States. That Army is made up of free citizens chosen from among a free people." Yep, it actually uses the term Army. And when you do your Bootcamp training mission, your drill instructors say stuff like "We might just make a soldier of you yet!"
While to the average layperson anyone in the military is a 'soldier', that's not true within the military itself. Only troops within the army are 'soldiers'. Troops in the air force are called 'air men'. And marines never call themselves soldiers, they call themselves marines.
What about Shephard's bio? It goes on to say that his 'Current Assignment' is the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, Santego Military Base, Arizona. It doesn't mention Marines or USMC in the name of the unit, or the military base. So all we know is that Shephard's training was in the Marines 'Special Forces', and then he was assigned to something else.
Some special forces units like the Green Berets and the Rangers exclusively recruit from within the Army, but others like the Army's Delta Force or the CIA's Special Operations Group recruit from the Army, Marines, Navy Seals etc. If the Department of Defense decided to set up a special unit to fight aliens, and needed its members to be willing to kill civilian witnesses, then surely they'd recruit from all branches of the military, they'd pick anyone whose record indicated they were ruthless and had the necessary 'moral flexibility'.
Half-Life was mostly vague and called them 'the military' or 'the government', but their vehicles had Army markings and their squad leaders wore berets, so all indications were that they were a special unit of the Army. And the only thing in Opfor that really contradicts that is occasionally a grunt might shout "Let's go, Marines!"
We can perhaps explain that away by suggesting any HECU that says it is one of Shephard's old buddies from the Marines, and they got recruited into the HECU together. While other troops might have been former Army Rangers, or perhaps even regular Army.
It seems to me that Gearbox Software simply wasn't aware that the Army and the Marines are separate branches of the military, or that Marines aren't 'soldiers'. Perhaps they thought that the Marine Corps was a division of the Army that specialized in amphibious combat. Or that Marines was just a term for 'elite soldiers', interchangeable with words like 'commandos'. Gearbox have never been shy in admitting that they were heavily inspired by Aliens. That film had a bunch of overconfident 'Colonial Marines' going in to fight alien monsters and getting horribly overwhelmed; Gearbox wanted to do the same thing and so went with calling their troops 'marines' as well.
They did, actually, make desert-camo variants of CBRN and PASGT gear along with webbing, but it came way later in the Gulf War, and the land side of the Gulf only lasted 100 hours, so by the time it was ready it wasn't needed anymore. it WAS in later Middle Eastern engagements, and the invasion of Iraq, though.
The berets adds more credence to them being Army than the other evidence, IMO -- the Ospreys and Apaches could be on transfer, in-universe, or a joint support team of some kind, but the berets is a clincher -- didn't know that before.
Not really -- concept art shows them wearing the correct PASGT helmets for the era, it's just a result of low polygon counts, like how Barney's glock looks more like a weird, mangled Colt.
I will say that it seems like the HECU had no idea (and plenty of moral quandry) of the fact they were sent in purely to waste a bunch of civilians. "Monsters, sure. But civilians? Who authorized this, anyway?". I think the DOD never actually intended the HECU to straight up, wholesale slaughter Black Mesa's staff, but the sheer gravitas of the Resonance Cascade basically made them hit the 'fuck get rid of it' button, since they wanted absolutely no trace that it had happened. At least that's my theory-- especially since OpFor has Shepard not even aware of his role as a kill-and-cover-up kind of guy.
I agree with you though that the HECU being Marines rather than a branch of the Army is pretty nonsensical.
YOU EYEBALLIN ME BOI!
While I like to believe that my hgrunts are Army, here's another bit of evidence towards the HECU grunts being Marines rather than Army:
http://combineoverwiki.net/images/thumb/0/00/Hgrunt_hl_group.png/800px-Hgrunt_hl_group.png
The sleeves are rolled up like how Marines roll their sleeves
https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/y3dZ0Zg8vi64yWrh6HkebeR-Z8M=/600x0/filters:quality(100)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/XIZM3REM7RCITOZXNZK45ZBHHQ.jpg
Compared to how the Army does it(Which looks better imo)
https://intpolicydigest.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1502669942928.jpg
Ain't no Marine gonna roll their sleeves like these Soldiers do.
On this, you actually lose your rank when you go join special forces. You could be a Sergeant and join the Green Beret's and now you're "Private" and following the instructions of the GB Sergeant. I'm not sure how or if that alters your actual pay grade or retirement package though, but I'd imagine the changes, if any, are favorable since they wouldn't want to scare off potential skilled candidates.
I think a lot of the inconsistencies are just the result of the developers not knowing much about the military or how they work, coupled with the fact that they clearly wanted to create a fictional military unit. A lot of it is 'monkey see monkey do', you mentioned the MP5's possibly being used because they saw pictures of SEAL's with MP5's, I think a lot of their design is just that. For instance the generic Army trucks all have that white star on, but the Army hasn't used that star to mark vehicles in years by the time Half-Life came out. But in the pre-information era, everyone knew that star from TV shows about WW2 and Vietnam, so the star goes on the green trucks.
The HECU are too large to by traditional special forces, which are usually present in much smaller numbers. If they do operate in large numbers, it's typically a group of special forces embedded into a group of regulars, rather than the entire group being special forces. The idea that the HECU are "special operations capable forces" which are trained for specific tasks (CQB, CBRN, Unconventional Warfare) though is very much in-line with how I precieve the HECU.
The way I see it, the HECU is a sizeable specialist unit stationed near Black Mesa, and likely have some personnel stationed at Black Mesa given the warehouses full of military equipment and vehicles we encounter; far far more than would be possible to bring in in the timeframe we see them, plus there's the AH-64 Apache on the helicopter pad in Inbound. The HECU's unconventional tactics, CQB skillset, and CRBN focus make Black Mesa a perfect training ground, perhaps even live-fire training if Black Mesa ever has any serious incidents like escaped specimines or the radiation massive leak also seen during Inbound. But Black Mesa is heavily compartmentalized and many doctors don't even know what they're working on, so I'd imagine the same goes for the HECU, with only a small number "authorized" to chase headcrabs around a lab if need be. But when the Black Mesa Incident began, they needed to combat the invaders fast and the HECU were the closest and most capable candidate, security clearences be damned. It's possible that they had military personnel sign gag orders and controlled their deployment so no one soldier saw too much, because they were still trying to salvage the situation. The soldiers near the launch pad discussing Gordon do make it clear that they aren't quite sure what happened, and soon after another soldier wonders why they are killing civilians, so it's clear they're being kept in the dark as much as possible.
But a unit that's not in the dark are the unknown Black Ops unit deployed to Black Mesa with with equally unclear objectives. They're seen as early as Apprehension, far before the HECU retreat, which means they've been on scene for most of the BMI. I'd imagine these are CIA Special Activity Division troops sent in to gather or destroy documents, generally attempting to stay out of site of the HECU since neither side are seen in the same place, and the female black ops do have active camouflage uniforms. When the HECU unexpectedly pulls out, the CIA sees no salvation for Black Mesa, and they covertly smuggle in a nuclear weapon and set it on a timer, giving themselves enough time for their own evacuation. So why kill Marines? Well we only see them killing HECU personnel after the HECU retreat, so perhaps they considered any stragglers to be a security / intelligence risk, and put them down as if they were no different than the surviving civilians.
Oh is this true?
I had seen a comment online that to join the Green Berets you need a minimum rank of Sergeant (E-5) to fulfill the 18-series MOS. But I'd not seen anything about you then getting your rank bumped back down to Private once you joined.
It seemed really dumb to me that Opfor had an elite force that included green recruits. But that explains it away - they were experienced soldiers/marines in various branches of the military, then recruited by HECU and became privates.
(I guess Shephard was badass enough to work his way up to Corporal in the couple of months he was in HECU before the incident?)
I also saw a comment online that "Privates (E2's) are frequently found within the Ranger Battalions." I wonder if that's a similar situation to the Green Berets - that they had higher ranks but were then bumped down to Private within the Rangers - or whether the Rangers does recruit exceptional soldiers right out of basic training.
Oh I agree, but I think there's a bigger case of that on Gearbox's side than on Valve's. In original Half-Life, everything about the troops is either fictional, or based on the Army. There's not one single thing that suggests they might be marines. (Well, other than the way they roll up their sleeves, hehe!)
The Army symbols might be out-of-date - such as the old-style Army stars from Veitnam / WW2 - but the point is that everyone associates them with the US Army. It would have been very easy for Valve to simply not label the Apache helicopters or Ospreys - the Apaches could simply have been green with no writing on them, the Ospreys could have had desert camo with no Stars on them - but they bothered to actually put the word Army on the Apache, and they bothered to add the Army stars to the Osprey.
As Jessica Cannon points out, the Army aircraft and vehicles could just be 'on loan' or part of a joint task force, but that unnecessarily complicates things when the most obvious explanation is 'they are Army'. And the berets are the real clincher - every squad leader wears a beret, and berets are specifically an Army thing.
The problem then arises when Gearbox do their expansion. Stephen Bahl did his job right and updated the grunt designs to look like a more believable Army special forces unit, such as the Rangers or Green Berets. But Gearbox's script writer decided to call them Marines, probably because that's what the military guys were in Aliens.
I wonder, has anyone actually ever done a count of how many soldiers are encountered in Half-Life and its expansions? My guess is that you encounter less than 500 troops in HL1 (including corpses), and including Opfor, Blue Shift and Decay the number still isn't over a thousand.
Hmm, apparently the US Army has about 7000 troops in the Green Berets. Army Rangers has 3,566 military personnel. (And 57 civillian personnel.) And there are 2,450 active Navy Seals.
Of course the ultra elite ones like Delta Force or Seal Team 6 (which recruits from Navy Seals) are much, much smaller.
While if we're talking 'specialist units', that aren't special forces... the US Army Chemical Corps has 22,000 soldiers. Woah. Although that's also including Army Reserve and the National Guard. But they've got to have several thousand on active duty.
Heh, this reminds me a bit of discussions about the number of Replica soldiers in FEAR. FEAR's intro specifically states that it is 'a battalion of replica soldiers', to which a character immediately responded 'a THOUSAND clone soldiers?!' Over the course of FEAR you end up fighting about 500 of them. In the expansion Extraction Point you fight about 300. In the next expansion, Perseus Mandate you only fight a couple of hundred Replicas, but you mostly fight ATC Security and Nightcrawler mercenaries. So the makers of the expansion packs actually managed to keep the number of replica soldiers within that 'battalion' size.
Meanwhile, the player is part of the FEAR team - an Army special forces unit for dealing with supernatural threats. FEAR was a tiny force of a dozen soldiers, because supernatural threats were purely theoretical. When a supernatural event actually occurred they got teamed up with Delta Force to deal with it.
But in the Half-Life universe, aliens and monsters aren't theoretical, Black Mesa has been exploring an alien world and bringing back creatures and samples for several years. So it makes sense that the Army would set up a sizeable anti-alien task force.
I completely agree with you on all those points. Except my feeling is that this sizeable specialist unit is a new Army special operations force. Not as small and elite as something like Delta Force, and not as big as the Green Berets. So something comparable to the Army Rangers. (Who wear berets!)
The purpose of this new special forces unit is fighting unusual threats like aliens and monsters. None of the troops in Half-Life seem to be surprised at fighting aliens. One has qualms about killing innocent scientists, but he's fine with dealing with monsters. While other grunts don't seem to mind killing civilians at all, grumbling about killing 'dumbass scientists' that don't fight back. The Army recruited a bunch of soldiers that could keep a secret. The same sort of guys the Air Force finds to guard Area 51.
Opposing Force introduced the idea of the grunts not knowing what their mission is. Shephard's diary mentions being trained for 'indoor strategic combat' but not knowing what the mission is really going to be about. And friendly grunts complaining "government cover-ups were not in my job description!" But my feeling is that Valve's original intention was for the grunts to be the military's specialist alien exterminators.
Aha, good point.
Did they ever bother to make urban camo (or arctic camo) versions of that gear though? I imagine not. So given that Half-Life's grunts wear urban camo (due to Black Mesa being mostly concrete complexes), they would always have had a mismatch between their clothing and their equipment. (Which suited Valve fine as they wants the grunts to be visible anyway.)
Interestingly, in the PS2 version of Half-Life, the grunt equipment pouches and backpacks are more of a tan colour that dark green. So maybe for the PS2 version Gearbox decided to give the grunts desert gear and webbing, as a mixture of urban and desert made more sense than urban and woodland.
So basically both Gordon and Andrian's first day on the job is also their last day on the job?
We also don't see anyone other than Gordon use these outlets. Kinda strange if you ask me. They don't even use the outlets for powering anything either. You'd think there would at least be some evidence of them using them somewhere somehow.
I have no idea, in all honesty.
Gordon's not on his first day, the Hazard Course happens an indeterminate amount of time before the start of the game.
Adding to this, there is also that photo of him in Opposing Force labeled "Employee of the Month," so if you accept the game as canon he's certainly been there for a good long while.
Nevermind the fact he didn't have to spend hours and hours flashing his ID and explaining he was new, and there wasn't any kind of orientation or guided tour for him -- it was just another workday.
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