[chico20854]

November 25, 1997

Speaker of the House of Representatives Munson, next in line of succession to the Vice President, is skiing in northern California. He and his wife slip out of his vacation home and do not leave word of their destination (Munson is fanatical about his personal privacy).

The Commander of the USS Olympia releases half of the crew for some well-earned shore leave following the conclusion of the long, dangerous patrol as the boat enters a period of refit alongside the submarine tender USS Emory S. Land.

Unofficially,

1st Brigade, 4th Armored Division completes Rotation 97-101 at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California and is declared combat ready.

Aboard the USS Oriskany, a second squadron, VA-153, matches the achievement of its sister squadron VA-175 by launching a full squadron mission.

The newly arrived vehicles that were transported to Europe aboard the Springfield Freedom and USS Boulder are transferred to a holding area at the British Catterick Barracks in Bielefeld, Germany, where user units are to pick them up.

Elsewhere in NATO-controlled Europe, armies are struggling to sustain operations as the flow of supplies through the heavily damaged port infrastructure slowly chokes off operations. On the Warsaw Pact side things are even more dire, with the Polish civilian population on the edge of starvation following a year where the nation's fields were battlefields and whose young and fittest citizens worked to eject NATO troops from the country rather than produce food and goods. Their Soviet patrons and allies are of little help, overstretched themselves supporting war from Korea to Germany, with their own Baltic States, Byelorussia and Ukraine nearly as devastated as Poland and with the subjugated populations of Romania, Manchuria and Jugoslavia dependant on them for sustenance.

XVIII Airborne Corps and Third Army direct additional supplies of ammunition and replacement vehicles to the 24th Infantry Division in Iran's northern Gulf coast. Airlift planners note that the 82nd Airborne Division has moved south, allowing the smaller airlifters to carry greater loads.

The Belizian command responds to the Guatemalan incursion in the south. They dispatch one of the British Gazelle helicopters to reconnoiter the location; it takes fire from a Guatemalan light machine gun but is not hit. Upon its return to base, the Belizians dispatch an infantry company reinforced with a British platoon to dislodge the Marines.