[Targan]

I love this thread. Allow me to relate a story from my last campaign as a way to illustrate what can happen when a higher ranking officer shows up and tries to take command of a unit.

The CO of the PCs' unit in my last campaign was Major Anthony Po, US Army Special Forces. At the start of the campaign he was a captain and was tagging along with the 5th Division's HQ element as a way to get himself deep into Poland without having to have his own bodyguard unit or sneak all the way in-country. He was on a DIA mission to kill 13 CIA agents inserted into the US military in Europe (he had originally been one of those CIA agents but had defected to the DIA after the nukes started flying because he blamed the US Government for getting the USA nuked). At the start of the campaign it was part of his back story that he had already assassinated 12 of them and the 13th was thought to be operating with pro-NATO partisans in south-central Poland, possibly with Marczac's Legion.

Between the Battle of Kalisz and arriving in Krakow Po was the 2nd in command of the rag-tag PC group, the commander being an Australian named Lynch who had become a US citizen and a US Army Major (he was actually a military intelligence type who had originally been involved in the development of high tech missile guidance systems). Unfortunately Lynch was a burn-out case, a hopeless alcoholic and drug user, and wasn't at all popular with the men and women he commanded. Lynch was killed when he took an AK round in the mouth while entering the tunnels beneath the Jasna Gora. Po took command and was later promoted to Major by Colonel Stark in Krakow.

When the PC party encountered B Troop, 116th ACR, Major Po immediately recognised the level of firepower gathered in Dobrodzien and decided he wanted to command it himself, but he was smart enough to recognise that the cavalrymen and women may be resistant to him taking command. He attempted to sweet talk them and build up friendly relations between himself and B Troop but soon realised that Captain Warren was resistant to the idea of going on the offensive against WP forces in the area. To try and get what he wanted, Major Po attempted to seduce Captain Warren but he critically failed his seduction roll and licked the scar on Warren's face that she had received during a rape by Russian soldiers earlier in the war. The relationship between Warren and Po never recovered from that rather catastrophic faux par.

After that Major Po lost patience with the diplomatic option and ordered B Troop to follow him into battle. An initial engagement against a straggler unit of Soviet light armor went very well but then Po (for reasons never very clear to me) decided to mount an assault against the forces garrisoning Krakow and when that battle didn't go according to plan B Troop mutinied. During a face-off between Major Po and his command element and Captain Warren and her senior commanders there was a brief shoot-out. One of Warren's men was killed and several of Po's men were wounded. Following an extremely tense stand-off Warren and Po agreed that their respective units would go their separate ways.

Months later in Bremerhaven Po discovered that B Troop had also made it back in time for the US evacuation back to the States. At the time the campaign ended (February 2001 in game time) Po was still trying to have Captain Warren court-martialled (with little succes).