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Damocles: Debrief / AAR
Company Command from the mission here.
I tried to develop and discuss as a plan as soon as possible. First I took a look at the mission area and the objectives and pretty quickly made the decision that 1 Troop will more or less directly attack the town from the south. Since I had no idea what will await us behind the border I wanted 2 troop as support for the guys doing the actual attack on the objective. To sum this up shortly.
Objectives
1 Troop - Attack the objective from the south and secure the HVT's
2 Troop - Secure the eastern flank and if possible take position at the military base.
Discussing the plan with the troop command had mixed results. I wrote a pm 1 Troop, 2 Troop and FSG-Lead one week in advance and the answers came in relatively late. However I made the decision to kick this off early, because I am aware not everyone has a lot of time on their hands. So doing this early It should provide the opportunity to have a impact on the general plan for the mission. Another question thats had to be answered with the troop leaders was the question if we will either push or play it slow once we get discovered by the enemy. In the planning phase 30 minutes before the start, we made the decision that we will try to push on and get out of town before the reinforcements arrive in the area.
Once we started the mission and we left the base, my biggest concern was to find out was ies between the border and the 2nd line you can see on the picture. So I let both troops and the FSG move to the edge of the border and let both troops and one hellcat scout the area. The only reports I got about enemy troops was one fireteam. So I have the order to actually kick this off. 2 Troop were supposed to make their way to the east of the town and also get eyes on the military base. The base was clear so I gave the order to have 2 troop moving to it. 1 Troop was supposed to quickly dash into the town and secure the HVT's, but there things go exactly as planned.
According to reports I got 1-1 pushed a bit too far from the rest of their troop. They attacked enemies along the road but it turned out they did not get all of them. This lead to 1 Troop Lead being shot and eventually killed. I did not want to leave the guys without leadership and there was no 2IC for 1 Troop so I assigned dogbadger as the new acting command for 1 Troop.
While 1 Troop formed up again I saw a lone enemy AT soldier moving towards a jackal of 1 troop. The guy started to actually get his AT out and aimed at them I at this point I pretty much yelled at both my signaller and JTAC to inform the guys about it. For some reason only the Signaller tried to eleminiate the contact and he got shot down. 1 Troops FAC tried to get him up but he could not revive him because of the "issues" with the epi. The enemy AT-Soldier was out of range for us so we fired mortars on him. Speaking of mortars, our JTAC worked very well together with FSG and they took out enemy positions inside the town and also enemry mortar positions on the outskirts of the town.
I was pretty impressed that 2 Troop managed to push down very quickly to their objective without any real issues. 1 Troop had a bad start but in the end they also got their objectives done and without a lot of own casualties. When the Hinds appeared out of nowhere their first victim was Null who was in a land rover. Null tried to help the Signaller and FAC of 1 Troop and he was on his way back. All I hard was a helo, a explosion and I saw smoke over a hill. We had no medic around and Null was too far away to reach him and of course we also had to deal with the Hinds and the fact that I just lost my signaller. Mike (JTAC) and myself took over the comms and Mike mainly kept up the contact with 1 Troop, while I kept in contact with 2 troop.
In the end everything worked out better as expected and I dont want to know what would have happened if our pilots did not win their crazy dogfight against those hinds. After 1 Troop managed to secure their LZ and move the HVT to it, I gave the order for 2 Troop to fall back to a position behind the border. 1 Troop got extracted with the HVT by helo and everyone got back to base.
Was nice fun.
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