What follows is a jumbled collection of afterthoughts (I still don't understand fully what happened either) so if it doesn't make sense or you don't like it, i don't give a damn.
Sign and Counter Sign. (e.g. Thunder... "Flash")
It's not hard but no one (myself included) thought to make one up for the raid on the refinery or whatever the hell that building was, and I'm kicking myself now. We had planned about an hour ahead to take that building in force but they had two guys in there, no surrounding perimeter force (that I could see, I entered the facility through the east entrance with Stick 2) or an intercept team to cut us off or ambush the PEDAR unit enroute to the extract zone.
WTH is that? The idea of having to take that building and calculating about 60% casualties for the insertion teams as well as for the PEDAR perimeter security forces was so predominant on the raiding team's mind we never thought to question shooting whoever didn't come in with us. I.E. the second infiltration squad wouldn't reveal even half of their faces when they entered the building on the west side so we couldn't identify their camouflage patterns... so... we shot at them (sorry guys...) Sign and Countersign would have been a Godsend. The two Venezuelan guys in the building were dead so fast, we couldn't comprehend that there wouldn't be any other contacts in that facility or even surrounding it until the bulk of our platoon was half way back to our FOB. At one point we sat around arguing with each other after the recovery mission regarding where the prisoner actually was, who was escorting him etc, that our 360 perimeter sagged to virtually nothing and we still had no losses, even when a small task force of (maybe venezuelans) began harrassing our south east side.
Afterwards the stroll to the nuke was completely amiss with any perimeter forces, units on patrol, or even a lone sniper crew dug in where the recovery team would have had to sacrifice either speed or personnel to recover the objective both on the way in and on the way back. Was the nuke even hidden in Venezuelan territory? I'd rather have been with the assault group who took the ridge near the "tower/smelter/that-concrete-tall-thing". Suggestion-wise I'd put in for the following with the game designers. Honestly, less story is better. Tom Clancy is cool to read, not roleplay. At least to me. Simple directives are better and this was the case most of the time but when the game slowed to a crawl for a hostage negotiation... and then CIA disarmed but stole the nuke and took off with it to the other end of the field, I don't understand where the hell that all came from or why the PEDAR forces didn't feel compelled to send a support team to escort the CIA operatives and make sure the nuke was handled correctly until the mission was called complete. This is made all the more surprising, knowing from the outset that the CIA are out for themselves and clearly operating independently to further their own goals both from the briefing and in action. Ultimately, it felt underwhelming as hell for the PEDAR and maybe the venezuelans who'd had several firefights prior to this one single action to recover the nuke and battle for the keys and codes in the first place only to have it stolen and they couldn't do much about it. Thank god the ASOV driver and the guy who grenaded us in the ASOV were cool enough to let a small unit from PEDAR go and get our bomb back after we shot up the CIA guys when they came back. (BTW, sorry to the guy in Multi-Cam who got lit in the parking lot when we were rolling out to pick that bomb back up and you charged us..maybe? We couldn't figure out what you were doing and you kept charging forward...so...yeah.)
Separately, I'd also suggest to everyone in the future for large ops that are free, bring one set of fatigues for each main force (excluding specialist units like the CIA group) so that way there isn't such a massive overbalancing in team sizes if one group collectively decides to not show up. (I feel kind of bad for the venezuelans but I also sort of envy them, they had more than enough people to shoot at.) If everyone is encouraged to bring two sets of cammies we can change on the field and have volunteers join up with the side that has less combatants. Last, the game's premise and objectives were actually simple enough that images would have been more than enough for the pre-op packet along with a HINT of what to do.
The rest could have been covered in the briefing and all the pre-game safety crap could have gone in the packet too including medic rules and real world injury code but w/e maybe because it got drilled into everyone's head for a long time in the morning that was why we didn't run into injuries that could have been prevented, etc. As far as having two red flags for different game stopping events, it's a good idea but maybe in the future we shouldn't use "Corpsman" for real injuries but "Injury" as code word for real injuries. A few of the guys on the field were actual Marines currently serving or past Marines who have served and "Corpsman" is just a part of their vocabulary now especially if we are having medic rules and they need to call for "medical assistance". I'm not a Marine but I rolled with one current and one vet on my unit yesterday and i heard it crop up a couple times and not because there was a real world problem, I'm not sure they caught the slips either.
All in all, pretty good event, though I think some people got tired and more than a few a little cranky towards the height of the day. (at least on PEDAR though I may be speaking out of turn.) All I'm going to say is this: 1. It's Tucson, you can't say you didn't expect it to be hot. 2. If you got bored, welcome to MILSIM, even the boring parts of "combat" are accurately recreated. Orders get botched, information is sporadic and jumbled to all hell, you go up a hill, then back down only to go up again and down once more. You do more walking, running, climbing, spitting, swearing and screaming than shooting and God only knows that the maniac who may run faster than you in a 60lb. vest and rifle and happens to be screaming at you to do something, is screaming so that you don’t just sit down when the action dries up and eventually get cramps later on or just to piss you off because “you’re not cool,” it's to keep the people involved and active so that if they feel like they did waste their time, they didn't waste it sitting down feeling ignored.
